The director of "American Primeval" stops by IndieWire's Filmmaker Toolkit podcast to talk about how he embarked on the toughest shoot of his career.

Creator Mark L. Smith's six-episode examination of scruffy, vicious people traversing the Utah Territory in 1857 also stars Taylor Kitsch and Dane DeHaan.

The 19th-century American West of American Primeval is a land of unyielding brutality, though nothing about this six-part Netflix series, premiering Jan. 9, is as violent as Peter Berg’s belligerently over-the-top direction.

Set during 1857's Utah War, 'American Primeval' lays out a world where love conquers little and indifference is the only path to survival. [REVIEW]

The series, now streaming on Netflix, depicts the brutality with which the Mormons sought to create a new world for their beliefs, the pride with which the native people held onto their ancestral lands, and the tragedy of the people just seeking to make a new home in the chaos. But is any of it true?

Peter Berg directs an epic six-part drama about the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, in which more than 100 settlers were murdered by militant Mormons.

Peter Berg is masterful at storytelling on the small screen with Friday Night Lights and on the big screen with Lone Survivor. He returns behind the

However, it saps anything resembling wistfulness from its Hollywood Western roots, complicating its chances of cornering the post-Yellowstone market (alongside the latter's many spin-offs). What's left is the husk of a beloved genre,