Hell on Wheels-the Western

[may2]

AMC saddles up a western with 'Hell on Wheels,' stays true to network's lineup of deep, dark dramas


BEVERLY HILLS - AMC officials say the network was looking for a Western.

Writers Tony and Joe Gayton say they were hankering to try a Western.

Actor Anson Mount says he was thinking maybe he should shake up his career by doing a Western.

You can see where this is going.

On Nov. 6, AMC will premiere "Hell on Wheels," a Western written by the Gaytons and starring Anson Mount, along with Common, Colm Meaney and a host of other characters.

Like other shows in AMC's growing stable of dramas, "Hell on Wheels" is dense and sometimes dark. Its nasty characters show occasional flashes of light and its heroes have flaws. Unlike some other AMC shows, it has a considerable amount of action, as well as profanity and graphic violence.

The show is set in post-Civil War America, across the lands where the transcontinental railroad is being built.

Mount plays Cullen Bohannon, who fought for the South although he had freed his own slaves a year before the war broke out, at the urging of his Mormon wife.

His wife was killed during the war. Avenging her death is now the reason Bohannon gets up in the morning.

This quest brings him to the railroad, where he meets a cast that Tony Gayton yesterday described to TV reporters here as "Hell's Kitchen in the West."

The laborers are Irish, Italian, German and black, among other ancestries, with the common goal of making hard lives better.

Common plays Elam Ferguson, a freed slave who isn't at all happy when a former slave owner becomes his boss on the line.

But the action isn't all on the line. Meaney plays "Doc" Durant, the ruthless entrepreneur building the railroad. His pitch is that it will make America great. His real motive is that it will make him rich.

"Hell on Wheels" also shows how the railroad pushed civilization west, displacing Native Americans as it went.

"It was the beginning of greatness for this country," says Joe Gayton. "And the beginning of the end for the Indians."

As this suggests, the show aims to tell sweeping stories, and Meaney among others suggests that setting it in the past helps it raise issues that are still touchy today.

"By going back," says Meaney, "it's easier to address issues like the relationship between races - not just black and white, but Italian and Irish, for instance. You can ask big questions, like what is progress?"

No one seems daunted that Westerns have fallen out of favor over the last few decades.

"Broken Trail" was one of the channel's highest-rated specials, AMC senior vice president Joel Stillerman noted, and HBO did well with the acclaimed "Deadwood," to which "Hell on Wheels" will inevitably hear some comparisons.

"You'll see iconic Western shots, like the big panorama and the mountains," says Tony Gayton. "But we hope it's the characters that will make people want to watch."


http://www.nydailynews.com/entertain...a_western.html

[Phantomstranger]

I saw a preview of this. It looks interesting. And it will be nice to have a western on TV again

[The Ringo Kid]

Personnally, with a title like that, I would rather it be about the WWII Armored Division and their "activities" in France through Germany.

[may2]

It premieres November 6.

http://www.amctv.com/shows/hell-on-wheels

[Richard--W]

Personnally, with a title like that, I would rather it be about the WWII Armored Division and their "activities" in France through Germany.

I was thinking the same thing, sort of -- I mean, that the title sounds like anything but a western. I hope it doesn't turn out to be another exercise in political correctness in which behavior and dialogue reflects lifestyles of the idle rich in Malibu and Bel Aire instead of the time and place of the American west. The way things are going, I'm not optimistic.


Richard

[The Ringo Kid]

I was thinking the same thing, sort of -- I mean, that the title sounds like anything but a western. I hope it doesn't turn out to be another exercise in political correctness in which behavior and dialogue reflects lifestyles of the idle rich in Malibu and Bel Aire instead of the time and place of the American west. The way things are going, I'm not optimistic.


Richard

Hi Richard, I fully agree. Ill give it a try but I hope it does turn out to be a good one. If its PC, im outta there in a heartbeat.

[Richard--W]

I just remembered, Hell On Wheels was the title of the third installment -- which was 2 hours -- of the TNT miniseries INTO THE WEST (2008). Heavily politically corrected: all the problems in the American west are caused by ignorant oppressive white men, but of course their women know better. Ominous title for a proposed TV series.

Pardon me for turning political.

Richard

[The Ringo Kid]

I just remembered, Hell On Wheels was the title of the third installment -- which was 2 hours -- of the TNT miniseries INTO THE WEST (2008). Heavily politically corrected: all the problems in the American west are caused by ignorant oppressive white men, but of course their women know better. Ominous title for a proposed TV series.

Pardon me for turning political.

Richard

Speaking of the ignorant PC people. I ride the bus in Corpus Christi and I overheard a conversation between a white guy/passenger and the driver-a hispanic guy. The passenger was reading a book about how the white men oppressed the Indians--totally ignoring the fact that the Spaniards did much worse.

I made mention of the fact about the Spaniards treatment of the Indians and almost got thrown off the bus. All I can say is-Stupid is as Stupid does, and in this case-both that passenger and driver were very stupid.

[Richard--W]

Try reading this acclaimed book by historian Thomas Goodrich. He lets the evidence do the talking in Scalp Dance. Not too academic, above politics and beyond blame games. It's a good place to start.


Richard

[The Ringo Kid]

Try reading this acclaimed book by historian Thomas Goodrich. He lets the evidence do the talking in Scalp Dance. Not too academic, above politics and beyond blame games. It's a good place to start.


Richard

Thanks for the title, I will look i tup at the library this Monday ;-))

[Richard--W]

The reason I mention this particular book is that it covers the same time and place, geographically and chronologically, as the new series HELL ON WHEELS. Wish I could get ten people -- okay, five people -- to read the book first, and watch the program as it airs, so that we could discuss it in a devoted thread. That would be fun.


Richard

[Paula]

Annnddddd... the review from The New York Times (if anyone cares). :)

Hell on Wheels

Chris Large/AMC
Hell on Wheels Anson Mount, right, and Ted Levine, on horseback, in a scene from “Hell on Wheels,” a new series on AMC, Sunday nights at 10 Eastern and Pacific times; 9 Central time.

It’s Mud and Blood, All the Livelong Day

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Published: November 3, 2011

The Transcontinental Railroad tamed the Wild West, but the building of it was one of the more savage adventures in American history. That’s the crux of a new western on AMC, “Hell on Wheels,” which is, if nothing else, ambitious. Even at a highfalutin channel it’s pretty unusual for television producers to list their literary and cinematic influences. It’s a little like a councilman thanking Winston Churchill in a sanitation bill — or a TV critic assessing “The X Factor” with a nod to Roland Barthes.


Chris Large/AMC

The rapper Common, foreground, plays a former slave who forms an uneasy alliance with a Confederate Army veteran.

Joe and Tony Gayton, the creators of “Hell on Wheels,” are fearless, however, boasting in their promotional material that they were inspired by Clint Eastwood’s movie “Unforgiven,” Robert Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and Jim Jarmusch’s cult favorite “Dead Man.” Their writing muses include Upton Sinclair, who wrote “The Jungle,” and Cormac McCarthy, author of “Blood Meridian.”

They don’t mention the one work that people are most likely to compare the series with: “Deadwood.” It’s a telling lapse. For just as AMC ads promise that “blood will be spilled,” it is inevitable that come the premiere of “Hell on Wheels” on Sunday, ink will be spilled on why the Gaytons didn’t try harder to do something totally different from “Deadwood.”

“Hell on Wheels” isn’t terrible or even half-bad; it’s a western, after all, and it has a lot of violence, which, particularly when inflicted with tomahawks and arrows, covers a multitude of sins.

But westerns, like a jazz standard, can withstand all kinds of riffing. The 1989 mini-series “Lonesome Dove,” adapted from the Larry McMurtry novel, revived the genre and also almost killed it. It was so good it was almost impossible to match. Yet “Broken Trail,” a 2006 AMC movie that even starred Robert Duvall in the same crusty, worn-out cowboy role, found its own voice, mostly by mixing Far East and West. In 2005 a TNT mini-series, “Into the West” made a point of flipping TV clichés — the first alcohol served is not “firewater” whiskey, but an Indian ceremonial drink, the first massacre is committed by buffaloes, not vigilantes or the cavalry, and the first scalping of a frontiersman is committed by a grizzly bear, not an Indian in war paint.
“Deadwood,” which was written and created by David Milch and was a critical hit for HBO for three seasons starting in 2004, took all the conventions of the classic western and turned them upside down. “Hell on Wheels” takes many of Mr. Milch’s innovations and flattens them out — “Deadwood for Dummies.” The theme music is startlingly similar, if more muted, and so is the faded sepia and gray cinematography. That bleached-out look has become so ubiquitous on AMC that it’s almost as if there were a premium on bright color, like the window tax that drove 18th-century homeowners to brick up their buildings.


In some cases monochromatic lighting makes sense. AMC’s “Walking Dead” fades its hues to match the illustrations of the graphic novel that inspired it, and “The Killing” is set in Seattle and was based on a moody Scandinavian thriller. “Deadwood” had a drained, claustrophobic palette that was almost an inside joke, an inversion of the grand sweeps of Technicolor in John Ford classics. The cinematography on “Hell on Wheels,” on the other hand, just looks familiar.


Most of all, many of the central characters seem modeled on ones from “Deadwood,” only without the flights of profanity and quasi-Shakespearean grandiloquence that made Mr. Milch’s dialogue so distinctive. Hell on Wheels is the name of a frontier tent city, and like Deadwood, it’s a muddy, cramped encampment for a ragtag crew of brutes — and whores — working on the railroad. The year is 1865, right after the end of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination, a time when, as the introduction puts it, the nation was “an open wound.”


The hero, Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount), is a taciturn Confederate Army veteran heading West to track down the men who killed his wife during the war. Working on the railroad, he crosses paths with a former slave, Elam Ferguson, played by the rapper Common, and the two Southerners form an uneasy alliance. Most of the women they meet are for hire, but there is one well-bred beauty, Lily Bell (Dominique McElligott), the English bride of a geological surveyor, who makes her way through hostile Indian territory in a corset and long skirts.


The railroad attracts all kinds of louts and swindlers, and the shadiest of them all is the boss, Thomas Durant (Colm Meaney), known as Doc, who was a real-life robber baron who used government contracts to enrich himself under the banner of Manifest Destiny. “This undertaking is subsidized by the enormous teat of the federal government,” Durant hisses at an engineer who doesn’t understand why his boss wants his railroad to loop around flat terrain. “This never-ending money-gushing nipple pays me $1,600 a mile, yet you build my road straight?”


Durant is a vicious bully who revels in his own greed and cruelty, but in a caricatured, small-bore way that makes it almost impossible not to think longingly of Ian McShane’s portrait of Al Swearengen, the twisted, charismatic villain of “Deadwood.”
As Bohannon, Mr. Mount has an easier time — his is a spaghetti western kind of role that mostly requires long, hostile stares and longer verbal pauses — and the actor looks quite a bit like Franco Nero in the era of “Django.” Ms. McElligott is equally watchable as Lily, who, despite all her breeding, adapts quite quickly to frontier mores.


However predictable, there are plenty of things to enjoy in “Hell on Wheels,” and sex and violence are only two of them. In a way it’s as paradoxical as its subject: a big, lusty but surprisingly timid look at the bold pioneers and profiteers who ravaged nature to build a nation.

HELL ON WHEELS
AMC, Sunday nights at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.
Produced by Entertainment One and Nomadic Pictures; developed by Endemol USA. Created and written by Joe Gayton and Tony Gayton; Joe Gayton, Tony Gayton, Jeremy Gold, John Shiban and David Von Ancken, executive producers; John Morayniss, Michael Rosenberg, Mike Frislev and Chad Oakes, producers. For AMC: Joel Stillerman, senior vice president for original programming production and digital content; Susie Fitzgerald, senior vice president for scripted programming; Jason Fisher, senior vice president for production.

WITH: Anson Mount (Cullen Bohannon), Common (Elam Ferguson), Dominique McElligott (Lily Bell), Colm Meaney (Durant), Ben Esler (Sean McGinnes), Philip Burke (Mickey McGinnes) and Eddie Spears (Brother Joseph).

[may2]

AMC’s ‘Hell On Wheels’ Debuts With 4.4 Mil

AMC’s newest series, period Western Hell On Wheels, was off to a strong start last night. It drew 4.4 million viewers and ranked as the cable network’s second-highest-rated series premiere behind mega-hit The Walking Dead, which opened with 5.3 million last fall, in total viewers as well as adults 18-49 and 25-54. Hell On Wheels is young-skewing, drawing more adults 18-49 viewers (2.4 million) than adults 25-54 (2.3 million). “I congratulate the entire cast and crew of Hell On Wheels for pulling off a project of this scope,” AMC president Charlie Collier said. “Bringing the grandeur of the Old West and the building of the railroad to life is no small feat and the Gaytons, with their team, have delivered a beautiful world of which we are all so proud.” The eOne-produced Hell On Wheels, set in post-Civil War America circa 1865, was created and written by Joe and Tony Gayton.

http://www.deadline.com/2011/11/amcs...-with-4-4-mil/

[Gorch]

I thought that I would never again believe anything I ever read in the New York Times, but this review is on the nose. The comparison to "Deadwood" is inevitable and "Hell" falls short on every level. It is quite graphically violent and racism abounds, as in "Deadwood", but the characters haven't found themselves quite yet. I'm willing to watch a few more times to see what develops, but if it doesn't become more complex and original. it won't be around much longer.
I miss Duke.


We deal in lead, friend.

[dukefan1]

It is quite graphically violent and racism abounds, as in "Deadwood", but the characters haven't found themselves quite yet. I'm willing to watch a few more times to see what develops, but if it doesn't become more complex and original. it won't be around much longer.

I really liked the first episode. As it was only an hour long, the characters havn't the time to develope yet, but I am sure they will. Usually, the first episode of any show is mainly used to introduce the characters and lay the base for the stories behind them. I'm hooked so far.

There is one difference between this show and Deadwood. No cussin'

Mark