One of my favorite film microgenres is the Ordeal. In Ordeal movies, characters embark on a perilous journey across some wild territory, and endure a grueling struggle for survival along the way, marked with repeated instances of terror and pain. Think Deliverance, Sorcerer, The Descent, Gravity, and most relevantly The Revenant, written by American Primeval creator Mark L. Smith. Go ahead and throw Martin Scorsese’s After Hours in there if you’re feeling generous, and Homer’s The Odyssey if you want to be complete about it. These narratives are compelling because of how they join the viewer and the protagonist at the hip: You’re not going anywhere until this guy or girl gets out alive, or dies trying. The only way out is through.
American Primeval is an attempt to create an Ordeal TV Show, which in this age of spiffy limited series is now a possibility. There are pros and cons to this approach. In the former column is the obvious point that on television show, your Ordeal can last a whole lot longer. You can drag out that primal struggle, allowing for more moments of bloody horror and stark beauty. And to fill up that extra real estate, you can create multiple protagonists, each on a different path, each undergoing an Ordeal of their own, each with their own appeal.
In this episode alone, for example, Sara, Isaac, Devin, and Two Moons trudge their way through blinding snows on horseback, until one goes lame and stomps Devin’s leg to smithereens in its distress after Isaac tries and fails to shoot it to death. Abish, meanwhile crosses the desert plain with Red Feather in an attempt to negotiate a ceasefire with the U.S. Army — which leads to her spotting Wolsey, the Mormon militiaman responsible for the massacre, and fleeing back across the land on a horse like a real Western heroine. Meanwhile, in the woods, her mad husband Jacob attacks both the bounty hunter Tilly and the Mormon soldier Cook, killing the latter for his participation in the massacre; Virgil, the leader of the party, leaves Jacob some supplies and abandons him to his fate in the forest.
Director Peter L. Berg uses each storyline to present the viewer with breathtaking views of three different environments, all of them picturesque and convincingly hostile to outsiders. Each contains its own threats as well: freezing cold, rampaging horses, frontier surgery, tense standoffs, bare-handed murder, rows of loaded rifles, bounty hunters, traitors, soldiers on all sides. If you don’t like one Ordeal, just wait five minutes.
The flipside of this, though, is that an Ordeal TV Show lacks the self-contained nature of even the lengthiest and wooliest Ordeal Movie. Let’s say you do like the Ordeal you’re watching: Maybe Abish’s gradual realization that she prefers life with the Shoshone to life with the white Mormons has grabbed your attention, or maybe you’re wondering just how close their shared plight will drive Sara and Isaac, or maybe you enjoy spending the occasional dialogue-free minute or two just vibing with Jacob as he holds his murdered friend’s pocket watch and loses more of his mind. But just as you’re getting into it, we’re on to the next storyline. You’re no longer attached to just one person at the hip, you’re getting passed from one to the next like grub around a campfire.
Of course this is just how most TV works. But on the big screen, the Ordeal is a uniquely focused form of storytelling. The pleasure of the Ordeal is its ability to burrow deep into the mindset of its main character as they’re put through their paces over the course of an entire film. By the end, ideally, you feel what she feels in your gut. That’s just not going to be the case when you’re bouncing around between stories and characters on a regular basis, episode after episode. It can even start to feel a bit, well, episodic: This happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and the next thing you know a grizzled mountain man is snapping a screaming child’s splintered bone back into place and it’s cut to black, roll credits.
And I haven’t even mentioned the opening montage of Brigham Young preaching fire and brimstone, or the bit where Jim Bridger nearly chops Mormon commander Wild Bill Hickman’s toes off with a shovel after he tries to make off with his pigs!
Something special about the Ordeal is being lost amid the sprawl. This isn’t to say that the results aren’t entertaining in their own right. (You can’t not be entertaining when you’ve cast Shea Whigham; this is what’s known as Whigham’s Law.) It’s simply to say that sometimes a story wants solitude rather than plenitude.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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