If you're not hip to the history of the post-Civil War Old West, the latest addition to AMC's lineup Hell on Wheels will confuse. If familiar you are, it will mystify. Its historical exposition and speechifying tell us it's a study in healing the wounds of war. But read its lips: dklhxnmwlfjsrk.
The pilot fails to do the one thing a pilot should do: compel its audience by making at least a little sense.
By the end of the first episode, it's clear that the principal cast members have nothing explicitly in common except that they're convening on the fictional work camp of Hell on Wheels, where Elam Ferguson (Common), a former slave, has just cut the throat of one-handed foreman Daniel Johnson (Ted Levine)––the only man in camp who knew the identity of Cullen Bohannon's wife's murderer.
If if that isn't confusing enough, there's also the robber baron Thomas Durant (Colm Meany) and Lily Bell (Dominique McElligot), who has been widowed and wounded during an Indian raid.
Hell on Wheels' fatal flaw is that it wants to be AMC's fullest expression of the American frontier; but breathing life into this many Western regulars––like the aggrieved gunslinger and the captain of industry––in the space of an hour has proven to be simply too much of a burden.
Chief among these regulars is Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount), whom we first meet posing as a priest and gunning down a discharged Union soldier in a confessional. He later explains that he's a former slave-owner and small-time farmer who paid his freed slaves wages until his wife was killed by marauding Union soldiers.
He starts out as a Man with No Name, and it feels like whiplash when he lapses into the One Good Southerner––the latest nauseating frontman of Hollywood whitewashing.
Hell on Wheels' premier should have been the capstone to AMC's running themes of self-determination and redemption, and its emphases on American history and allusions to its characters' backstories give it the feel of a spin-off.
In spite of the all this familiarity, very little can be said for certain about the characters. Is Bohannon a Man with No Name or just a wayward soul? Is Durant a tycoon or a true believer? The multitude of uncertainties and ambiguities tax the patience of the viewer.
AMC's fascination with American frontiers got its start in the seedy tweaker underbelly of the Southwest in Breaking Bad in 2008, and has been inching closer to the real thing ever since. From psychologizing Mad Men antihero Don Draper's hoosier roots to the freshly feral Deep South of The Walking Dead, its programming consistently undermines the sense that America is truly settled.
But when it came time to treating the American frontier explicitly, AMC fumbled. Big time.
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