TV Preview: Hell on Wheels

THERE’S a town in the wild, wild West where time stands still. Beneath the hills and circled by railway tracks, wooden shacks, tents and a few brick buildings nestle apparently unchanged since 1865. There’s an eerie silence as I walk around this ghost town, treading through the mud, taking note of store signs: Longbottom & Co: Licensed Gun Maker; Dinner, 5 cents; Baths – clean water 3 cents extra; another sign declares “Population: One Less Every Day”. Abandoned clothes hang from makeshift washing lines: breeches, cotton shirts, long-johns. There are an awful lot of barrels lying around.

Stepping inside the saloon, with its warped old piano and abandoned glasses on the tables, it’s easy to imagine that any minute, cowboys will stride in, order sarsaparillas (whatever they are) and then start a fight which will end with someone being thrown out into the mud.

But hang on, behind that otherwise impeccably authentic bar, there’s a can of Coke. And that rail line, complete with waiting engine and a couple of spare carriages – it doesn’t actually go anywhere and there’s only a few hundred yards of track. Despite appearances, this is not really a remnant of the old West. It’s just the set for a TV show, Hell on Wheels, which starts this week on the TCM channel.

Everyone’s filming a scene nearby, so the town built for the show is empty just now, apart from a guy testing flaming arrows for an attack later on. This gives me the chance to poke around this detailed and convincing replica of a real historical phenomenon (and, unlike the fake town of Blazing Saddles, all the buildings have backs).

Hell on Wheels was the name given to a travelling town which grew up around the construction of the Union Pacific railroad, which raced from East to West in an attempt to beat the line being built from California – the two lines eventually joined to become the Transcontinental Railway. With a lawless population of rail workers, prostitutes, merchants and gunslingers far from civilisation, there were murders almost every night so the Hellish part is understandable. As for the Wheels, as the line grew, the town packed itself up, buildings and all, and rode the train to the next temporary stop a few miles ahead.

This is the fascinating setting for the new show, made by the US cable company AMC, home of Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead. But it’s actually filmed in the Canadian west, on the plains and rolling hills of Alberta. Nearby Calgary is a thoroughly modern city, with oil wealth propping up its high end restaurants and lively nightlife. Out here, though, that seems like another world.

But there’s more to a TV drama than an interesting backdrop. Hell on Wheels’ ten-episode-long series crams in a number of unusual characters who work, clash and fall in love by the side of the tracks.

Inevitably – it is a Western – there is a mysterious gunslinger with a brusque manner but a soft spot for underdogs, played by Anson Mount, who turns up seeking the men who murdered his wife. Rapper-turned-actor Common plays a former slave, only recently freed but already disgusted that, in the aftermath of the Civil War, not enough seems to have changed for his people. There’s a beautiful lady (Dominique McElligott) dubbed “the fair-haired maiden of the West” but who, naturally, turns out to be tougher than she looks (just as well: these frontier women survived only 17 months on average). A Cheyenne who’s converted to Christianity and left his tribe represents the Native Americans for whom the coming of the railroad meant disaster, while two Irish brothers and a Norwegian “sheriff” stand for some of the many immigrants who filled the tent city.

The only one based on a real historical figure is Colm Meaney’s Thomas Durant, the man behind the construction of the railroad. Meaney is best known as the everyman engineer Miles O’Brien in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, or from the film adaptations of Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy. But here, in a rare lead role, he gets to relish Durant’s swaggering determination to keep the project going through troubles with the authorities, the workers, the Native Americans and the landscape itself.

Away from the set, in a revolving restaurant at the top of the Calgary Tower, Meaney says he was drawn back to TV by the script. “In the last few years, I started to see great shows on cable TV but I was being sent film scripts that were terrible. Everything seems to be aimed at a 15-year-old idiot – they don’t even give the kids much credit. Everything is really spelt out and simplistic, they don’t want a story.

“I think this show is a fascinating combination of history, action and great writing – the vocabulary of it is almost Shakespearean. Durant says things like ‘there will be perfidy of epic proportions’! He doesn’t vacillate, he’s very pragmatic and amoral. This guy is incredibly authoritative and ruthless in so many ways but there are vulnerabilities.”

Mind you, Meaney adds, he wasn’t above the lure of just getting to be in a Western, having grown up when “cowboys and Indians was a big thing”. Indeed, while once it dominated, the Western has been pronounced dead since the 1960s, yet every couple of years staggers back to life. Since Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, revisionist takes are now the norm and a few years ago the HBO series Deadwood – to which Hell on Wheels is regularly compared, though they’re only superficially similar – was critically acclaimed.

Now there’s a new wave, with Hell on Wheels only the first of a reported half-dozen new TV Westerns coming soon, as well as “modern Westerns” like Justified, while in the cinema the hit remake of True Grit will be followed by Quentin Tarantino’s forthcoming spaghetti-style Django Unchained.

Once, perhaps, they appealed as an image of an apparently more straight-forward time, when men were men and good and evil could be distinguished by the colour of their hats. But the newer Westerns are hardly escapist, showing just how tough life was then, as well as exposing the genocide of the Native Americans and the legacy of slavery.

Still, at least they could see the enemy; on the frontier, survival meant relying on instincts. As Mount points out, “The reason Westerns work in a time of national crisis is that it’s set in a time without law and the protagonist has to listen to his gut. You have to deal with that question of whether you can trust your gut or not, beyond that there’s nothing to say.”

His character, Cullen Bohannon, starts out as the classic loner with a gun, but develops into a more interesting figure. In person, Mount is almost as intense as his character, with a “no bullsh*t” attitude: he bemoans that: “America is so f***ing PC these days. I thought it was really ballsy that they wanted the protagonist to be a former Confederate officer who had owned slaves. As a Southern man, it’s really rare that I see Southern characters portrayed that are not stereotyped or vilified or aggrandised. [Bohannon] is a complex whole man with his own set of problems, incredibly well drawn.”

Mount has the noted Southern politeness which sees him attempting conversation while shivering after being dunked and held underwater over several hours, filming a future scene. Not that he’s complaining. Earlier, he stresses: “If I can get one thing across, it’s that I love playing this role, it’s probably the best professional experience I’ve ever had. I don’t have a relationship, I don’t have a dog, I can’t even keep a plant alive, I just enjoy my work. I like not being distracted.”

Being far from Hollywood and among this uncanny simulation of the old West must help him get in character. After just a couple of days here, I’m jest ’bout ready fur another sarsaparilla myself.

• Hell on Wheels begins on TCM (Sky 317; Virgin TV 415) on 20 May at 9pm, repeated on 24 May at 9pm. With thanks to Tourism Calgary (www.visitcalgary.com), Hyatt Regency Calgary (www.calgary.hyatt.com) and Air Canada (www.aircanada.com).