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.

Given everything that’s stacked against our heroes and heroines, is there any possibility that the likes of Sara (Betty Gilpin), Devin (Preston Mota), Two Moons (Shawnee Pourier), Isaac (Taylor Kitsch),

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 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.

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,