![\"Primeval\"](\"http:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/06\/primeval.jpg\" "\\"Primeval\\"")
To minimal surprise, ITV has cancelled its early Saturday evening family action\/adventure drama series Primeval.\u00c2\u00a0 If you will indulge me, I’d like to just say a few things about this sad outcome.<\/p>\nTo minimal surprise, ITV has cancelled its early Saturday evening family action\/adventure drama series Primeval.\u00c2\u00a0 If you will indulge me, I’d like to just say a few things about this sad outcome.<\/p>\n
The ITV Contender<\/strong> The Winning Formula<\/strong> Clearly ITV decided they needed more drama, more adventure.\u00c2\u00a0 The production company behind Prehistoric Park were contracted to take their CGI dinosaur expertise and make a true rival for Doctor Who.\u00c2\u00a0 Prehistoric Park, with its time portals and dinosaurs coming through to modern day, was gone, instead we had Primeval, with its temporal anomalies and, er, dinosaurs coming through to modern day…\u00c2\u00a0 On paper they sound quite similar and it is clear to see how they took the Prehistoric Park premise and retooled it for an action\/adventure family drama.\u00c2\u00a0 The park was gone and the man made time portals are replaced by (apparently) natural temporal anomalies.\u00c2\u00a0 Nigel Marven’s leading role is replace by an evolutionary biologist character named Professor Nick Cutter (played by Douglas Henshall).<\/p>\n I won’t go into massive detail but the basic plot is that each week a temporal anomaly will appear in modern day England linking back to, usually, a prehistoric period.\u00c2\u00a0 One or more ‘monsters’ will emerge and wreak havoc and Cutter and his team will be called in to clean the mess up (usually getting the animals back through the anomaly).\u00c2\u00a0 It was very much ‘monster of the week’ fare.\u00c2\u00a0 As the series went on we would begin to see future creatures come through (a chance for the CGI team to come up with something not based on fossil records) and a political intrigue storyline was layered underneath the familiar monster attack theme.<\/p>\n The format was beginning to feel a little tired, even with a rival ‘evil’ team and Professor Cutter’s ‘evil’ wife on the rampage.\u00c2\u00a0 The producers slavishly stood by the monster of the week format, though augmenting it with these extra elements.\u00c2\u00a0 Now I can’t claim to have seen every single episode but I have seen the majority of them.\u00c2\u00a0 I have to wonder, though, if I was getting a little fed up with the formulaic nature of it, what were people who had seen every single episode thinking?\u00c2\u00a0 Presumably those people would be its biggest fans and probably rather liked it how it was.\u00c2\u00a0 The more casual viewer might not have minded either – after all they knew they could miss an episode or two but still tune in and know what to expect (the plot ‘arc’ wasn’t deep or all that necessary to follow (and, yes, the naming of the Anomaly Research Centre (ARC) cannot have been a coincidence!))\u00c2\u00a0 Millions of people tuned in every week and there are a lot of very vocal fans, so perhaps they weren’t wrong in their approach.\u00c2\u00a0 I can’t say the series really grabbed me but maybe that is just me.<\/p>\n Drama bad…<\/strong> Money Matters<\/strong> Talent shows and reality TV might be cheap and popular but where are the merchandise opportunities?\u00c2\u00a0 People don’t (as far as I know!) buy DVDs of ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ or ‘I’m a Celebrity… Get me Out of Here’.\u00c2\u00a0 Action figures?\u00c2\u00a0 Books?\u00c2\u00a0 Computer games (actually quite possibly for talent shows!)\u00c2\u00a0 Film rights (such as the proposed Hollywood adaptation of Primeval?)\u00c2\u00a0 Look at the massive Doctor Who merchandise industry and imagine all that licensing money that must be coming into the BBC.\u00c2\u00a0 Then add in overseas TV rights.\u00c2\u00a0 According to Wikipedia (the font of all knowledge!) new Doctor Who has been sold to at least 42 countries. I cannot find such information for Primeval but I don’t doubt for a second that it has much higher international interest than, say, Britain’s Got Talent.\u00c2\u00a0 Even the repeat (or ‘rerun’) value of a good drama like Primeval has got to be vastly superior to a talent show where the audience voted for contestants (but, clearly, cannot on a repeat).\u00c2\u00a0 It does feel like a false economy to axe Primeval if they were looking beyond the very short term.<\/p>\n Going It Alone<\/strong> Competition and Imagination<\/strong> To minimal surprise, ITV has cancelled its early Saturday evening family action\/adventure drama series Primeval.\u00c2\u00a0 If you will indulge me, I’d like to just say a few things about this sad outcome. The ITV Contender Let’s not pretend otherwise, Primeval was ITV’s attempt to rival the BBC’s unexpectedly popular revival of Doctor Who (no doubt […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,16,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-sci-fi","category-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.staggeringstories.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nLet’s not pretend otherwise, Primeval was ITV’s attempt to rival the BBC’s unexpectedly popular revival of Doctor Who (no doubt there are some that will now say they always expected New Who to be as massively popular as it now is but I certainly wasn’t amongst them and nor were the BBC suits in London (but let’s not get into that right now!))\u00c2\u00a0 As a series, Primeval never quite hit the heights of Doctor Who, not in terms of viewing figures, audience appreciation figures or the general saturation into popular culture.\u00c2\u00a0 Of course Doctor Who had something of a head start, what with a dormant affection, in many of the older generations, for the original series and a rich history to plunder from.\u00c2\u00a0 Primeval had to start from cold.<\/p>\n
\nChildren like dinosaurs!\u00c2\u00a0 They also like Doctor Who and that’s got time travel.\u00c2\u00a0 So, thought ITV, lets make a rival to Doctor Who with people who time travel to prehistoric Earth!\u00c2\u00a0 Even better, extreme wildlife programmes, such as the BBC “Walking with…” series, are popular – lets make those time travellers modern day zoologists and animal conservationists!\u00c2\u00a0 No, this isn’t Primeval I’m talking about but its immediate predecessor, Prehistoric Park.\u00c2\u00a0 Borrowing heavily from the Jurassic Park idea of conserving otherwise extinct animals (mainly ‘dinosaurs’ to my untrained eyes) in a vast animal preserve.\u00c2\u00a0 Real life naturalist and wildlife presenter, Nigel Marven, played himself as the head of the Prehistoric Park team and the whole thing was played as a ‘docu-fiction’.\u00c2\u00a0 They even had David Jason narrating it.\u00c2\u00a0 It was entertaining enough but, as it was supposed to come across as a documentary, they were limited in the dramatic licence they could take (even though they were jumping back through man made time portals and coaxing extinct wild animals back through them).<\/p>\n
\nBeyond the merits or otherwise of Primeval, what does its cancellation mean for genre TV?\u00c2\u00a0 Clearly it isn’t good.\u00c2\u00a0 Primeval was pulling in respectable numbers, not quite up there with Doctor Who but that isn’t a fair comparison.\u00c2\u00a0 With a retooled format (and perhaps slightly more engaging characters – or is that just me, too?) it may have gotten Who levels of viewers and audience appreciation.\u00c2\u00a0 I do rather doubt it, though – at least for the viewing figures side.\u00c2\u00a0 ITV has been in a massive decline for some years, as has TV viewing in general.\u00c2\u00a0 ITV consistently trails the BBC nowadays but it is not without its successes.\u00c2\u00a0 I am, of course, talking about the likes of Britain’s Got Talent and other talent, reality and game shows.\u00c2\u00a0 Popular and very cheap to produce.\u00c2\u00a0 You can just imagine the ITV bean counters saying to one another – we can spend more on a drama series or spend less on a talent show and get higher ratings, let’s fill our schedules with talent shows!\u00c2\u00a0 Thank goodness for the BBC, whose charter prevents such short sighted thinking.<\/p>\n
\nIt’s not just the success of their cheap programmes at ITV that has sealed the fate of Primeval.\u00c2\u00a0 Obviously money is the important factor and CGI dinos don’t come cheap, even these days.\u00c2\u00a0 ITV intends to cut \u00c2\u00a3160m from it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s programming budget over the next three years and, in the past day or two, an ‘ITV spokesman’ has been widely quoted as saying \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Our current focus is on post-watershed dramas,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d although they are not ruling out commissioning or airing pre-watershed dramas entirely…<\/p>\n
\nI think we can be certain that Primeval’s intended stablemate, Demons, won’t be returning either.\u00c2\u00a0 That really won’t surprise anybody, especially after Philip Glenister very publicly stated he wouldn’t return for a second season.\u00c2\u00a0 How much did the failure of Demons affect the cancellation of Primeval?\u00c2\u00a0 We can never be sure but if we look at Primeval sitting out there on its own in the ITV schedules and then turn the channel to BBC 1 and see what they are doing… Very quickly after the success of Doctor Who, the BBC announced they were going to create a new Robin Hood series, to take the same slot as Doctor Who but in the Autumn (as opposed to New Who’s Spring slot).\u00c2\u00a0 Now BBC 1 also has Merlin in the same early Saturday evening family drama slot that Doctor Who created.\u00c2\u00a0 When Doctor Who returns in 2010 the BBC will have such family, pre-watershed, drama on throughout the year (the quiet summer months aside and assuming both Robin Hood and Merlin continue).\u00c2\u00a0 That’s a pretty solid line up that will keep people coming back week after week.\u00c2\u00a0 ITV just didn’t have that.\u00c2\u00a0 They tried but Demons destroyed that hope for them.\u00c2\u00a0 Without the money to create a replacement for Demons there wasn’t really a sustainable place for Primeval, it just wasn’t making a big enough mark on its own.<\/p>\n
\nWhatever the cause of Primeval’s extinction (and the wider extermination of drama on ITV) it is a very sorry tale.\u00c2\u00a0 Doctor Who has some indirect competition from Robin Hood and Merlin but is that enough?\u00c2\u00a0 I think it is vitally important that ITV gives BBC 1 competition as well.\u00c2\u00a0 Clearly that is not going to happen from now on, for a good few years, at least.\u00c2\u00a0 Thank goodness for Doctor Who – if that hadn’t have come back in 2005 we would almost certainly be completely bereft of quality family drama now – as we were for so many years before.\u00c2\u00a0 At least there is something out there to fire children’s imagination but our hopes for a multi-channel family drama renaissance have been destroyed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"