After watching all five seasons of "Hell on Wheels" I feel I am being kind by giving it a rating of 7 out of 10. Unfortunately the excellent cinematography, breathtaking landscapes, creative sets, fanciful costumes, and all of the mud do not redeem its ridiculously implausible interpersonal relationships, anachronisms, and (in too many cases) shallow character development.
The producers could not have come up with a better duplicate of the original "Django" protagonist Franco Nero; Anson Mount's steely gray eyes peering out from under his wide-brimmed hat are a direct rip from the opening bar scene of Corbucci's 1966 classic.
Colm Meany's portayal of the seemingly ruthless robber baron is well-played, but too watered down to allow us to despise him for the fraud he actually is.
The other supporting characters come and go in an endless parade of preposterous scenarios, in some cases even more ridiculous than the make-up and plastic noses of the Italian-Americans portraying "redskins" on old episodes of "Wagon Train" or "Gunsmoke".
I will concede that the series is engaging. The little operettas play out as each new character comes and goes, keeping us intested enough to keep watching without being interesting. Rather than developing the character and letting them be part of the plot development, the writers instead choose to simply kill them off, thereby eliminating any necessity for further creative plot development.
Rife with little anacrhonisms which are in most cases easily overlooked, the completely ridiculous relationships between characters of different colors causes the entire series to become farcical. The notion that a black man would be working along side a white man in the post-Civil War reconstruction era is laughable at best. Moreover, the introduction of characters who are (presumably) based on real-life figures takes it out of the realm of "fantasy western" and into what some mistakenly might perceive as something with some factual historical basis. This is taken in the end far past any limits of absurdity in the final episode, when we are introduced to a famous military character ostensibly to further plot development, but more likely the writers' inability to pull a more convincing rabbit out of their hat.
As with "Forrest Gump", the series is fun to watch and full of action - from fist fights to train wrecks and everything in between - but is nonetheless completely lacking in any depth or meaning.
If only the writers had strived to show us something of substance about who the characters were, and how they would have really behaved in the post-Civil War era as much as they strived to show us that the towns of the old American west were mud pits, they would have really had a winner.
Alas, it's just another big-budget pot-boiler.
Review of Hell on Wheels
