He ends up working on the Transcontinental Railroad in search of the men who murdered his wife and child, and though his reasons for staying evolve over the course of the series, they are never any less complex or compelling. The story centers on Cullen Bohannan (Anson Mount) a former Confederate soldier who originally heads West, not for a fresh start, but revenge. Hell on Wheels is also unflinchingly honest about the dark underbelly of both the sprawling railroad world and the nascent America that is coalescing around it, fueled by cutthroat capitalism and the gleeful exploitation of those somehow deemed as “other,” be they Black freedman, Native Americans, or Chinese workers.
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#HELL ON WHEELS SERIES#
It is also a series that is uncomfortably specific, and not just when it comes to the dirty realities and uneasy tensions that accompany life in an ever-moving town camp with few outlets for its male denizens beyond alcohol and prostitutes.
#HELL ON WHEELS FULL#
It is a rich, painfully realistic depiction of America’s expansion West, full of the sort of jaw-dropping scenery and endless vistas that make you repeatedly wonder why we don’t see more stories set in this time period more often. An overlooked and wildly underrated series that dramatized the construction of competing cross-country railroads in a place still reeling from the Civil War, its story is the dream of Manifest Destiny realized, with all the good and ill that necessarily entails. Sure, there are a handful of shows about the colonial era ( Turn: Washington’s Spies), the tumultuous Wild West ( Deadwood), or even the Civil War ( Mercy Street), but few last for very long, and even fewer manage to really interrogate the difficult and often painful elements of America’s past.ĪMC’s Hell on Wheels somehow managed to break this cycle on multiple fronts, running for five full seasons despite its bloody, often painstakingly slow plot. But rarely do we see stories about America’s own history depicted in the same way as we do stories about virtually any other place or period. And there’s no bad time for a Jane Austen adaptation, as evidenced by the recent arrival of Sanditon and the new feature film version of Emma.Įvery so often a prestige cable outlet will turn out a fascinating, if often overly bloody historical epic, like Rome (HBO), Black Sails (Starz), or Vikings (History), series whose liberal inclusion of sex and violence are clearly meant to attract more male viewers than another rumination on the unfair fate of the bulk of Henry VIII’s six wives might. Dramas like The Crown, The Spanish Princess, and The Tudors speak to our national obsession with messy (usually British) royals.
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Shows like Downton Abbey, Bridgerton, and Outlander feed our love of high-end costume series centered on romance and class issues. Generally speaking, American audiences love period dramas-as long as they’re of a particular stripe.