You might not love their shows as much as the critics do. You might not even like the likes of Don Draper, who is the emptiest suit this side of Lexington Avenue, but you gotta love the array of bad-boy leading men that AMC always manages to come up with.
Cue the music, enter Anson Mount as Cullen Bohannan on AMC’s new and intriguing Western, “Hell on Wheels.”
Bohannan’s the Old West answer to Draper. No, he’s not a Madison Ave mad man, but he is a lean, mean, drunk who knocks ’em back until he’s comatose and wakes up nasty but looking gorgeous.
Although the series is already being compared to HBO’s long-dead “Deadwood,” it shouldn’t. For one thing, aside from the fact that both take place in the Old West, it’s like comparing “Pan Am” to “Mad Men” simply because of the era and the locale.
This series centers around not a place but a movable city called Hell on Wheels, which moved with the transcontinental railroad as it was being built east to west.
“Hell on Wheels” is a place full of bleak, nasty, hard-working people from hookers to gamblers to freed slaves to men who were on both sides of the Civil War.
They are all there because it’s the only way to make money — despite the horrible conditions. The former slaves (most notably rapper Common, who is outstanding) seem to have gone from bad to worse in this hell hole.
The tent city is filthy, the people are filthier and tempers and violence are always ready to explode.
The building of the railroad is under the auspices of the once-real-life crooked businessman Thomas “Doc” Durant (Colm Meaney).
The only man able to design a way to run Durant’s rail through the mountains is killed by Native Americans, while his gorgeous wife, Lily Bell (Dominique McElligott), escapes, though badly wounded and nearly dead.
Bohannan, meantime, is on his own mission to hunt down and kill the Yankees who raped and killed his beloved wife.
The most intriguing — and scary — character is the head of security, a man called The Swede (Christopher Heyerdahl), a nutjob on the order of the albino monk in “The Da-Vinci Code.”
No, “Hell on Wheels” is not a perfect show — there are too many missteps.
For example, right afterBohannan gets hired as the foreman, he immediately takes off for several days to hunt down more of the rapists — and no one notices that he’s gone.
The Native Americans, too, are too pat.
In once scene, the chief’s son (Julian Black Antelope) undergoes a hanging-by-nipples sacrifice and has a vison in which “I see the great steel beast. His breath was black.”
Excuse me? These guys were the greatest trackers in American history — they didn’t notice the great steel beast with black breath being built a half-mile away?
Then, there’s Lily Bell. After being rescued thisclose to a gangrenous death, she cleans up real good and inexplicably finds more fantastic clothes to wear than Kate Middleton.
Either there’s a movable Saks tent next to the pig pen, or I’m missing something here.
But you won’t be tuning in for the fashion show.
In fact, for women anyway, with men like Mount, Common and Black Antelope to stare at, who cares what she’s wearing!