Annie Proulx’s acclaimed 2016 novel Barkskins weighs in at more than 700 pages and covers a time span of 300-plus years, but the new Nat Geo miniseries based on the book is not nearly as ambitious. Creator Elwood Reid has adapted just the first hundred pages or so, changing the multi-generational saga of environmental exploitation into a period piece about a land grab in colonial Quebec in the 1690s. Reid’s Barkskins is an ensemble drama set in a single time period in a single location: the town of Wobik in what was known at the time as New France. Although the story deals with murder, betrayal, and conspiracy, it feels limited and somewhat inconsequential, the opposite of the grand scope of Proulx’s novel.
The book’s main characters are only two of the Wobik residents struggling to survive on the frontier, caught between the native Iroquois and the aggressive Hudson Bay Company, both of whom hope to drive the French from the land. Rene Sel (Christian Cooke) and Charles Duquet (James Bloor) cross the ocean from France as indentured servants, obligated to work for three years to pay off their debts. They’re both sold to local landowner Claude Trepagny (David Thewlis), the wealthiest and most pompous man in Wobik, who has grandiose plans for his plot of land on the outskirts of town.
Meanwhile, Hudson Bay agent Hamish Goames (Aneurin Barnard) arrives in town with his Native guide Yvon (Westworld’s Zahn McClarnon) to find out what happened to a fellow Hudson Bay representative who’s gone missing. That disappearance is tied to a massacre of settlers blamed on the Iroquois, but clearly perpetrated by shady interests within Wobik itself, possibly English businessman Elisha Cooke (Thomas M. Wright) and his right-hand man Gus Lafarge (Matthew Lillard). Local innkeeper Mathilde Geffard (Marcia Gay Harden) and her husband are caught in the middle of this deadly business dispute.
There is also a group of women known as the “filles du roi,” or “king’s daughters,” essentially mail order brides who are sent to serve as wives for the frontiersmen, sponsored by the French government. The scheming Melissande (Tallulah Haddon) appropriately sets her sights on the scheming Trepagny, and they seem like they’ll make a good match. Other characters come and go, making the show feel like a collection of subplots without a central narrative. Thewlis and Harden, just by virtue of being the most recognizable actors in the cast, end up getting the most attention, and Thewlis, with his exaggerated Pepe Le Pew accent and wide-eyed ranting, steamrolls over any other performer onscreen.
Thewlis isn’t the only one sporting a questionable accent since the dialogue is almost entirely in English despite the French-Canadian setting. Some of the actors really commit to the French accents, while others barely bother at all, which can make it hard to tell which characters are meant to be French and which characters are meant to be English (the Hudson Bay Company is based in England, which is why they are trying to drive the French away). Thewlis may be going overboard with his performance most of the time, but at least he’s having fun. The rest of the actors grimly slog through the dull material, which takes too long to coalesce around the Hudson Bay conspiracy, while still meandering through other plot threads.
Early episodes hint at some possible supernatural happenings related to the massacre or to Trepagny’s somewhat spooky estate, but those don’t amount to anything, and at worst they come with hints of condescension about the show’s Native characters, especially Trepagny’s housekeeper and lover Mari (Kaniehtiio Horn). Yvon is a hyper-competent tracker and fighter who speaks perfect English and enjoys reading poetry, but the Iroquois are mostly silent, interchangeable menaces, just as dangerous to the main characters as the duplicitous Hudson Bay Company. Rene spends a lot of time cutting down trees on Trepagny’s land, but if there’s an environmental message to the story, it’s obscured by the sudden bursts of violence and the half-hearted cliffhangers.
Although it’s a frontier story, Barkskins doesn’t have the action-adventure tone of a modern Western, and its flirtation with the supernatural doesn’t have the eeriness of a colonial story like Robert Eggers’ The Witch. With its dutiful rotation of various subplots and its somewhat simplified approach to a complex historical period, Barkskins often resembles an old-fashioned network-TV miniseries, the kind that were commonly adapted from doorstop novels like Proulx’s. Each installment of the eight-episode series is a little too long, ticking off the boxes of each character arc, and those arcs and the overall plot move slowly over the course of the series. This version of Barkskins doesn’t cover a time period of hundreds of years, but sometimes it feels like it’s taking that long.
Starring David Thewlis, Marcia Gay Harden, Aneurin Barnard, James Bloor, Christian Cooke, David Wilmot, Thomas M. Wright, Tallulah Haddon, Kaniehtiio Horn, Lily Sullivan and Zahn McClarnon, Barkskins premieres Monday on Nat Geo at 9 p.m. ET/PT.