Anomaly wouldn’t do this: A look at ITV’s Primeval
ITV’s decision to cancel the show appeared to take its producers by surprise, with the third series finishing a couple of weeks previously on a cliffhanger and a string of loose ends still to tie. Co-creator Tim Haines told Digital Spy that story plans were in place for at least two more series. And with a Primeval movie reported to be in the early stages of production, plus rumours of a spin-off series (which has since been confirmed to be happening in Canada), I thought it was a shame that the original show had been given its P45.
Launched in February 2007, after the success of the revamped Doctor Who two years previously had highlighted the audience for Saturday-night telefantasy, Primeval hit the ground running. With sparkling time portals (known as ‘anomalies’), prehistoric beasties, government cover-ups and almost weekly appearances of Hannah Spearritt in her pants (her character’s flat had to be kept really warm, to keep her pet reptile happy - a cunning ruse, if ever I heard one), the show drew an average weekly audience of 6.4 million over its first series.
The premise - a small team of scientists, led by Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall), investigate anomalies while clearing up the stray prehistoric animals that wander through - was simple enough that the show could be enjoyed as a ‘monster of the week’ romp, while longer-term story elements quietly built the programme’s mythology. When the first series ended with one of its lead characters, Claudia Brown, wiped out of existence due to some meddling in the past, it felt like the story was really starting to head somewhere.
In the third series, Jenny’s personality morphed pretty much into Claudia’s, and the character was written out, just two episodes after Nick Cutter was killed by his villainous wife Helen (Juliet Aubrey) - a move that appears to have been instigated by Douglas Henshall wanting to leave (I was unsurprised as I thought he looked bored in his three series-three episodes). Though Cutter’s replacement, ex-policeman Danny Quinn (Jason Flemyng), was very likeable and was just starting to come into his own, it seems obvious that the series’ finale would have been more dramatic, not to mention nicely symmetrical, with Nick wrestling Helen for mankind’s survival.
Still, story niggles aside (and I’ve not even mentioned the bizarre cloning subplot), I enjoyed the first three series of Primeval and I’m looking forward to its fourth and fifth, the first of which airs in January. The show is fun, easy-to-watch, Saturday-night escapism - family-oriented in tone and full of humour, but not averse to trying to scare, nor afraid to kill off popular, regular characters in horrible ways.
Of course, like all drama broadcast on commercial channels, the show is best watched in a recorded form (if the screenwriter wanted the McDonald’s jingle to play while our heroes were staring death in the face, he’d have at least made a note in the margin), but in these days of PVRs that’s as easy as pressing a button. Much harder to fathom is the mystery at the centre of the programme: how come there’s something, especially a modern science-fiction series, worth watching on ITV?
The exception that proves the rule, Primeval is its own anomaly. Investigate that.