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Unless you kept your finger on the pulse of U.K. sci-fi TV shows in the mid-2000s, you could be forgiven for missing a quirky little adventure series about time travel, dinosaurs, and a whole lot of wild adventures.
Primeval premiered in 2007 and ran off-and-on through 2011 for five seasons and a total of 36 episodes (this is a U.K. series, remember, so episode counts are traditionally lower per-season). Now it’s streaming in-full on Peacock, and it’s a perfect opportunity to dive into a sci-fi adventure that is wildly ambitious (even on a shoestring budget) and just unabashedly fun.
RELATED: Stream Every Episode of Primeval on Peacock
The series is a fairly easy pitch: Mysterious anomalies start popping up and creating portals into the past, and wherever those portals open up, dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures are typically crossing over into our present day and wreaking all kinds of havoc. Thankfully, we have a small team of good-looking and brooding scientists to look into the problem, led in the early seasons by Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall) and Stephen Hart (James Murray). That pair are then joined by two university students, Connor Temple (Andrew-Lee Potts) and Abby Maitland (Hannah Spearritt), who make up the core team in the show’s first couple of seasons.
Like many sci-fi shows, the cast turnover ramps up a bit the longer in the tooth (no pun intended) the longer the series runs, but the creative team does a good job of keeping the action chugging along without getting too bogged down in exactly who is hunting down all these dinosaurs, saber-toothed creatures, and dodo birds week to week.
Why Primeval is worth a watch (or a rewatch!)
Though it’s largely flown a bit under the radar in general, Primeval was a modest hit during its run and built up a fanbase by channelling all the best parts of its wide-ranging premise. Put in modern terms (though admittedly, Primeval pre-dates a few of these), the show is equal parts Jurassic World, La Brea, and Torchwood — tackling stories about altered timelines, dinosaurs roaming the modern world, and portals to the past all along the way. Basically, every new episode brings a new portal — a new creature, a new mystery, and a new challenge for the team to deal with.
For a low-ish budget sci-fi series, the special effects are also surprisingly solid. No, these effects aren’t going to fool you into thinking its a Steven Spielberg production, but for a TV series they hold up surprisingly well for the era. The VFX were handled by London’s Framestore production house, the same company that handled the BBC’s Walking With Dinosaurs nature documentary. So, there was certainly already some familiarity with the concept.
Like all good sci-fi shows, Primeval also survived a cancellation or two along the way, with its original U.K. network home ITV pulling the plug after Season 3 (despite solid ratings) due to larger financial challenges, though a co-production deal was eventually struck that brought the series back for two more seasons before it was cancelled again.
But even that wasn’t the final end for the Primeval franchise, as it eventually spawned the loosely-related 2013 spinoff series Primeval: New World, which actually aired on SYFY for its single 13-episode season (the spinoff was led by SYFY fan favorite Niall Matter, who played Zane Donovan on Eureka).
Stream all five seasons of Primeval now on Peacock.
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