This Sunday, cable network AMC will re-broadcast the first season of Hell on Wheels. While I don’t recommend abandoning whatever holiday adventure you have planned for spending all day on the couch, it might be worth letting the DVR do the work for you, and catching up on this series a week at a time this coming winter.
Filmed in Alberta, but set in post-Civil War Kansas, this western uses the birth pangs of the Union Pacific railroad as the backdrop for a sprawling tale encompassing a dozen major characters and a cauldron of uniquely American social issues.
Cullen Bohannon serves as the nominal focus. Tall, dark, handsome, but broken and bitter, he returns home from the Confederate army to find his farm and wife ravaged by a pack of marauding Union troops. Armed with a postcard group photo they left behind, the doggedly pursues each of the platoon members, gunning them down one by one. We pick up his quest half way through. After an efficient dispatch in a frontier town, he makes his way to the railroad camp , “Hell on Wheels”, where he sweet talks his way on a work team.
He’s assigned to lead the colored workers, who are digging out the roadbed. Chief among them is Elam, played by singer Common. Bohannon and Elam, through the story, develop a mutually beneficial working relationship as wary as one would expect considering Cullen’s former status as a slave holder.
“Meanwhile”, out on the prairie, a surveying party is overwhelmed by an angry pack of Sioux. The only survivor, the head surveyor’s wife Lily Bell, escapes after blocking an arrow with the palm of her hand, then pulling it from her shoulder and using it to stab the warrior who had killed her husband. (This despite her petite, blond, and altogether too cute for words appearance.) She gather the roll of maps her husband created, showing the best route to and through the Rockies.
The chief financier of the project, Thomas Durant (played with a melancholy deviousness by Colm Meany), is riding his own special train to ensure the first 40 miles of the line get built on time. Without real track, the government supported project will not garner sufficient capital to win the race west against other lines to the north and south. But, he needs those maps so he’ll know which way to turn at the fork of the Platte River.
His security chief, a tall Norwegian called “the Swede”, keeps order in camp mainly by his intimidating accent and dogged detective skills. When Bohannon and Elam dispatch the line foreman, who was the Captain of Bohannon’s wife’s killers, the Swede gets ready to hang Cullen. But Bohannon turns the tables, and sweet talks Durant into giving him the foreman’s old job.
Down in the traveling town, along with a brothel full of camp following women, two Irish lads are entertaining the captive crowd with a lantern show of slides from the Emerald Isle. And a preacher, on leave from his wife and daughter, has set up a tent revival, assisted by a converted native, brother to the warrior who led the band against Lilly and her husband.
This crew, who grow more motley the longer they are away from civilization, are fodder for a wide range of story threads, both personal and cultural. Most are obvious: the hypocrisy and difficulty of the Reconstruction, when no one realised what it would mean to begin the integration of all the “Freedmen”. The stunted opportunities for women, and how they had to be smarter than the men who ruled they world. The casual intertwining of politics and money, and the freewheeling world of unregulated, yet state supported capitalism. The pecking order of prejudice, with Irish and blacks near the bottom, and natives not even on the scorecard.
Other stories are unique to this collection of characters: Lily’s choices among potential relationships with men; Bohannon’s on-going revenge, looking for the last remaining killer; Elam’s struggle as a mulatto, not being able to live in either of his parent’s worlds.
AMC usually allows its series to take their time with structure, and Hell on Wheels is no exception. Each episode is usually a classic 24 hours long, and filled with musings and shots of mud, distant riversides, and gathering thunderheads. But each show also has its share of action and enough dilemmas to keep the viewer focused and, more important, caring about this accidental rolling city, it’s environs, and what it meant for the future of our country.
I’d give this 4/5 stars: Not Deadwood, but a far sight better than most westerns on film or TV these days.