Primeval
Production
When strange anomalies start to appear all over England, Professor Cutter and his team must track down and capture all sorts of dangerous prehistoric creatures from Earth's distant past and near future.
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Trailers & Videos
Primeval Season 1 Trailer
Seasons
Eight years after his wife Helen disappeared, evolutionary zoologist Professor Nick Cutter - along with his friend Stephen Hart, his geeky student Connor Temple, zookeeper Abby Maitland, Special Forces leader Captain Tom Ryan, and government officials James Lester and Claudia Brown - discovers that mysterious rifts in time and space called Anomalies are allowing creature from across Earth's history to run rampant in the present; and the group subsequently become a Home Office research team tasked with predicting the Anomalies and containing the ceatures which come through them, and learning more about the Anomalies and why they are happening. However, Cutter secretly has an agenda of his own about the Anomaly operation: as the team investigate the Anomalies, Cutter begins to find more clues that imply his long-missing wife Helen is alive and living in the past on the other sides of the Anomalies. The rest of the team eventually learn of this, and that Helen is indeed alive and in the past, but she has been greatly changed by her time there and her study into the Anomalies, and the team are uncertain which side she is on. Eventually, Helen seemingly allies with the team to find and contain an Anomaly in the past to the future and to combat a deadly predator from the future which is on a killing spree in the present; but while Nick and Helen are searching in the past for the future Anomaly, Nick discovers that Helen only wanted to find the Anomaly and see the future, and after Captain Ryan is killed, Nick returns to the present. However, there, Cutter finds that Claudia Brown has been erased from the timeline while he and Helen were in the past.
Cast
Ciarán McMenamin
Matt Anderson
Ben Mansfield
Hilary Becker
Andrew-Lee Potts
Connor Temple
Hannah Spearritt
Abby Maitland
Alexander Siddig
Philip Burton
Ruth Kearney
Jess Parker
Ruth Bradley
Emily Merchant
Ben Miller
James Lester
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Reviews
Peter McGinn
This review is about series 1. I expect someday I will return and do an update after I rewatch the subsequent four seasons.
I was not one of those kids who grew up liking all things dinosaur. I guess I was more into DC comic book heroes. But I began to appreciate dinosaurs when the Jurassic Park series of movies came along, where the stories were excellent and the dinosaurs looked and acted more real.
I have also always enjoyed time travel stories, and in a way, this show combines those two sci-fi sub-genres. It seemed like a good fit for me, and indeed, I enjoyed series one overall. There are plenty of tense moments, realistic creatures, and bits of wit and humor sprinkled throughout. I especially appreciated Ben Miller’s portrayal of the sarcastic head of the secretive government department that dealt with the incursions. It would have been easy to have an authoritarian, square-headed bully in the role.
The storylines were intriguing and the ensemble cast had great chemistry for the most part. If they ever do a reboot, however, there are a few changes I would suggest. I think Connor really needed a girlfriend outside of the team. His panting after Abby got old and repetitive real quick. And do we really need the Helen Cutter character throwing monkey wrenches into the plots by magically appearing and disappearing like a goddess in a Greek tragedy? She never makes a clear case to explain her position on what they should do about the anomalies. Plus she seems about as unlikeable as a gal could be expected to be after going without sex for several years. I think cutting her from the show could be the making of Nick Cutter as a man.
Series one ends with a massive cliffhanger and revelation, so I assume someone had green lighted the second series by the time they filmed the final episode.
So I enjoyed series one and will rewatch the next series and report back here. Good science-fiction shows, or even fair ones, can be pretty thin on the ground.
You've reached the end.