Hell on Wheels, a TV show centered on the building of the Transcontinental Railroad after the Civil War, is back again. It’s on AMC on Sunday night.
Although this is primarily a Western and there is a lot of gunfire and violence, it’s set against a somewhat realistic background. Last week’s show opened with the construction crew raising trestle bents to cross a gorge.
Thanks for the tip.
Always looking for a good program worth watching in the great TV wasteland…
Bob
This year’s back episodes are on On Demand on Comcast, if that helps.
We’ve also started watching “Copper” on BBC, also Sunday nights. No trains, but it’s set at the end of the Civil War in New York City. Again, not for the squeamish. Both shows, oddly, have “ladies of the evening” making up the bulk of their female casts.
My wife and I watch Hell on Wheels, although we aren’t really what you would call huge fans. The production is excellent and realistic, although their rail consultant hasn’t won them over toward good realism. The locomotives are decidedly fakes, and the tracks are never ballasted, as examples of problems with realism. Also, their location process for right of way seems weird and entirely too flexible. These things were ironed out well before the first trestles were planned.
However, the show is unique for us because there is no character in the entire production with whom either of us would like to be friends or to share a meal. There is nobody very smart or likeable, nobody to really cheer for, except perhaps for the facially marked whore. It’s dawg eat dawg, perhaps not unrealistically in the frontier camps of railroads. But, it is very real, intense, and hardly a dull moment. And the Canadian actor who plays the dour tall Swede is just creepy. LOL!
BTW, we get it on AMC…the American Movie Channel. Its first four episodes for this season are being broadcast in succession today, so check your listings. Tomorrows will air in the evening.
I absolutely love this show, even if it is more cowboy thant railroad. Naturally the railroad is prominantly featured though.
Sure they’ve taken some liberties, but I think overall they’ve done a decent job - in the rush to build as much railroad as possible, ballast was an afterthought. The rough-hewn ties were the order of the day. And there were some alterations to the surveyed route as construction went on. Mostly Irish construction gangs, too. Sure the locos are fakes, but they are fakes built to the proper era rather than taking one of the workign Hollywood seam locos and using those - most all of those being at least 50 years too new. Most of the time they have the rollign stock correct but I’ve seen a few slip by with too-modern trucks on them. I also don’t think Charles Durant spend most of his time at the railhead in a private car. And sometimes they slip out with some more modern slang.
But, I watch every week, I’m glad it came back, unlike the only other show I faithfully watched, and will continue to watch. I agree with Crandell, The Swede (“But I am Norwegian”) is a particularly creepy fellow. And I do like Colm Meaney as Durant - do with they’d get a little more into the financial schemes he used to finance the railroad. They did hit it back in the first episode when he blackmailed the senator into investing into his Credit Mobilier scam but it all seems to have taken a back seat for now.
As noted - thee’s quite a bit of violence in this show, so not really for the kiddies. But overall I think it’s a very well done depiction of a rough and tumble violent time living on the edge pushing through one of the first great engineering achievements after the Civil War. A hard, rough life to be sure - and the characters are almost always slogging through the mud and nothing is ever really clean.
–Randy