Sara & Isaac’s Slow Burn Romance Is ‘American Primeval’s Bleeding Heart

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for American Primeval.]

For anyone going into Netflix’s limited series American Primeval hoping for a happy ending, we encourage you to first crack open an American history textbook for a refresher on the myriad of reasons why that was never going to happen.

Settling the western half of the United States in the 1800s may have expanded the American dream from sea to shining sea, but it was a fraught endeavor that forcibly claimed the ancestral lands of native communities and sowed the seeds of a growing nation with the blood of its residents. From director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights), American Primeval is a fictionalized take on the true story of the Utah War, a brief conflict in 1857 between the volatile members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (also known as Mormons) fleeing religious persecution and the U.S. military sent in to enforce some semblance of law and order in the wild west.