What's it about?
Tells the epic story of post-Civil War America, focusing on a Confederate soldier who sets out to exact revenge on the Union soldiers who have killed his wife. His journey takes him west to Hell on Wheels, a dangerous, raucous, lawless melting pot of a town that travels with and services the construction of the first transcontinental railroad, an engineering feat unprecedented for its time. The series documents the railroad's engineering and construction as well as institutionalized greed and corruption, the immigrant experience, and the plight of newly emancipated African-Americans during Reconstruction. HELL ON WHEELS chronicles this potent turning point in our nation's history and how uncivilized the business of civilization can be.
So, how was it?
AMC is quickly establishing itself as the go-to channel for compelling dramas, right up there with HBO and Showtime. Starting with MAD MEN and continuing with BREAKING BAD, THE WALKING DEAD and THE KILLING (and even the short-lived RUBICON), AMC has committed itself to dramas with complex characters and morally ambiguous plots. It's more than clear that HELL ON WHEELS is meant to follow that basic DNA, but somewhere along the line it managed to fall disappointingly short.
First off, the settings, the costumes, all of the art direction is amazing -- it's a fully immersive 1860s environment. But it felt as though the AMC execs simply thought, "Let's take our trademark complex characters and their morally dubious actions and dump them in the Wild West!" without really stopping to think about what made those trademark characters and plots so intriguing in the first place. What we get here is a mere shadow of AMC's superior shows. The protagonist, Cullen Bohannon, is no Don Draper or Walter White. This is no fault of the actor -- Anson Mount plays the rugged Confederate soldier to a tee. But the shades of grey that have made those two now-iconic characters so compelling are absent here. It feels like the writers were trying to make him complex and contradictory but didn't actually know how to write those qualities into his character, so instead they simply made him a Confederate soldier and former slave owner (bad!) who was convinced by his northern wife of "the evils of slavery" and freed his slaves before the Civil War even started (good!). He now shoots men in cold blood in churches (bad!) but is really out to avenge the wrongful death of his lovely, progressive wife (good!). The entire portrayal felt ham-fisted and poorly executed, lacking any of the subtlety or layers that make Don Draper so real.
The rest of the cast is rounded out by characters similarly draw in black-and-white -- there was not a shade of grey to be seen (other than in the bleached cinematography). Common plays Elam, a former slave now working on the railroad, angry to still have a white boss, angry that his best friend dies on the job, angry about seemingly everything. He even owns a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation to wave in Cullen's stupid white face. Dominique McElligott plays Lily, the pale and delicate British wife of a railway surveyor -- but in the tradition of AMC's strong female characters, you know there's going to be more to her than meets the eye. Too bad they had to prove this fact by having her physically overpower an angry Native American and stab him through the skull with his own arrow in a laughably unbelievable sequence.
Colm Meany plays Thomas 'Doc' Durant, the man in charge of building the railroad and the consummate villain of this story. You can tell that Meany is a terrific actor and could play a deliciously nasty, love-to-hate-him bad guy -- so it's really too bad that he's given such a one-dimensional, cartoonishly evil role. There is nothing real about this character, at least yet. He seems to be evil just for evil's sake, and his only motivation is money. Not nearly compelling enough to keep me invested in his story. His monologue at the end of the episode about how he will be remembered as the "villain" of this "drama" did not come across as winkingly self-referential, but instead too meta for its own good. We get that he's the bad guy and he knows it.
The on-the-nose dialogue poured in all episode -- a full-out discussion of the morally dubious things war makes people do (show me don't tell me!), or my personal favorite, "We'll manifest our destiny!" (Clearly supposed to make the viewer feel smart for recognizing the phrase "manifest destiny" from our high school history class.) Everyone kept saying precisely what they were thinking in broad swaths of generality.
But perhaps my biggest problem with this show thus far is its one-dimensional portrayal of Cullen as the noble Confederate soldier fighting for justice and Doc as the evil, corrupt Union government official. Of course, I know that there were not strictly good guys in the Union and bad guys in the Confederacy -- it was much more complex than that. But without any subtlety or deeper examinations of motivations, these portrayals feel heavy-handed rather than complex, revisionist rather than real. TIME Magazine featured a story this summer titled, "Why We're Still Fighting The Civil War," about how our country has fogged up the true conflict with romanticized stories of the Lost Cause and noble Southerners fighting for States' Rights. The romanticizing of the South, started by BIRTH OF A NATION and GONE WITH THE WIND, is exactly what's led our country to forget what the Civil War was about. (The TIME article cites a poll done last year by Harris Interactive of adults all across the country -- a two-thirds majority of whom believed the Civil War was fought over states' rights, not slavery.) I understand the desire to romanticize the underdog, and I'm all for morally ambiguous stories, but unless the writers manage to come up with more complex motives and truer portrayals of their characters, then this show will remain one-dimensional and ham-fisted, furthering the popular romantic notion that the South was nobly defending its land against the aggressive arrogance of the North. Surely, in 2011 we have come farther than that simple stereotype.
Rating:
** Okay. I may give it another episode or two to see if it gets better.
While I can't fairly give it a one-star rating (it still has AMC's superior production quality and some solid turns by good actors in sub-par roles), I will most likely not be tuning in again unless someday I hear that the show has dramatically transformed into something genuinely compelling instead of a parody of better AMC shows. HELL ON WHEELS will undoubtedly finds its audience, as the Western is not a genre that has been seen on TV since HBO's dearly beloved DEADWOOD. Fans of the genre will most likely find things to enjoy in this series, if only because there's nothing else that currently fits the bill. But those who tune in out of idle curiosity because they like AMC will most likely end up underwhelmed.
What about you, Fellow Addicts? Did you find the show more engaging and complex than I did? Or were you also bothered by the abundance of on-the-nose dialogue? How does it compare to AMC's other shows? Vote in the poll below and then hit the comments!
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