The engaging new AMC series “Hell on Wheels’’ isn’t quite a revisionist western, and it probably won’t enter the TV pantheon beside the influential - if, let’s admit it, sometimes pretentious - “Deadwood.’’ Set in the 1860s, the show is a hybrid that’s dirt-caked like “Deadwood,’’ but then peopled with relatively one-dimensional characters and underexamined situations. It seems like it’s going to be a painfully realistic and probing take on the racial, gender, financial, and religious tensions of post-Civil War America, but it doesn’t quite go there, opting instead to deliver a set of more stereotypical western personalities and plots.
Still, the uneven genre identity of “Hell on Wheels,’’ which premieres on Sunday at 10 p.m. after “The Walking Dead,’’ did not stop me from enjoying the first five episodes of the season. Indeed, once a character known as the Swede (Christopher Heyerdahl) shows up in episode 2, with his silent-picture expressiveness and the kind of threatening presence usually found in Coen Brothers movies, I was fully invested in the show and looking forward to seeing the rest of the 10-episode season. The Swede is just the kind of twisted psycho creep you want to watch closely, the showiest bad guy in the “Hell on Wheels’’ stampede of antiheroes led by financier, swindler, and railroad builder Thomas Durant (Colm Meaney).
Created by brothers Joe and Tony Gayton, the show is set in the tent city known as Hell on Wheels that traveled along with the building of the Union Pacific Railroad as it moved westward. Amid the traveling brothels, churches, and saloons, many Irish immigrants and former slaves mix uncomfortably with war veterans and the smarmy Durant. Newly emancipated, the black men digging the railroad are nonetheless abused and underpaid by their white bosses, as if the Civil War never happened. And then everyone in this lawless morass of hostility has to contend with attacks by Native American warriors.
