User reviews

I saw the first two episodes and so far I must say that while I look forward to more episodes I am not overwhelmed. As most everyone else has said, suddenly the whole world doesn't know that there are anomalies all over the place. That bothers me but you have to get past it and move on.

The plot is very familiar.

Missing things: Connor and Abby. OK, they were cute. In two episodes, they had no hint of this with anyone.

Rex. So far, everything brought through is gigantic and eats people. For every gigantic creature in a real world ecosystem there should be thousands of small ones.

Nick Cutter. There is no wise man who has a clue. They're all kids.

Common sense. By the second episode, they should darn well know that they could be going after very, very large creatures. They should equip themselves appropriately or at least make a very visible effort to do so. If you're going after a predator the mass of an elephant, bring an elephant rifle or better yet something in .50 BMG. Did they? Not in the second episode.

I hope that they will wise up and produce something as durable as Sanctuary or Primeval. Let's see if they do it.

Primeval: New World is now set in Canada and very much like the UK series you have a main male character and something happens to his wife. This urges him to research about the anomalies and hunt dinosaurs with a few friends. Now in the first few episodes they established and created everything that first 4 series of the UK Primeval did. I mean it took until series 3 to point out that anomalies effect mythology whereas in New World they stated it in episode two. And also some episodes did feel like remakes - a lot; honestly, on some episodes it's like someone got the original screenplay and then just changed names and locations. But apart from all that it was very enjoyable; they kept making references to Primeval every now and again and the ARC plays an role in there too. So I think it is a pretty good spin-off to one of my favourite shows and it even brought new story-lines and events what were quite new but also a lot of plots that we'd seen before back in the UK. It did end on a cliff-hanger like pretty much every Primeval series did and unfortunately it has now been cancelled so we will never see season 2; but like I said, this spin-off was a good run and pays homage to its roots so that was good.

I suppose that's the end of the Primeval franchise all together now then but I hope people remember this great piece of entertainment.

I've seen a lot of bad to mediocre reviews on this series and I felt it was time it received a review that really actually does the show justice. If you're expecting it to be exactly like Primeval then don't watch the show or ignore the original while you're watching it, view it as its own entity. This is a spin-off of the original and therefore it will have its own story arc.

Some of the most common complaints I've seen is how different it is from the original and how it's 'just a bunch of people getting chased by dinosaurs'. Every show has to start somewhere and most of the reviews I've seen are from people expecting the characters to know exactly what's going on from the very beginning. That's not what happens they, just like in the first season of Primeval, are learning as they go.

This show has much better CGI than the original, granted the original got better graphics the longer it went it still doesn't compare to how well done the graphics are in New World. I was actually impressed when I compared them side to side. It's not easy making dinosaurs look realistic, but I think New World does a fairly decent job.

The characters all have a great amount of depth to them and I really hope to see a season two so their backgrounds can be explored more. There are also some great dynamics between the characters and it is obvious the cast has a great amount of chemistry between them. There are also plenty of witty one liners if that's what you enjoyed in Primeval.

On the downside the first few episodes are rather slow. It's needed to introduce the characters, but it can be a bit much if you're used to Primeval's quick moving plot, which was really only that way because each series was about six episodes long (New World has over twice that many episodes in its first season). After those first few episodes, however, it becomes a roller coaster ride that leaves you breathless and wanting more.

I strongly believe in story/the idea, and I tend to believe that the story is everything. That this is not the case is proved by remakes. I am not in general against remakes, but most remakes do not add to the story, but take things away. Perfect examples are the remakes of Life on Mars and Primeval. Primeval may be overdoing it, but it does not add something more, quite the opposite, the new version has more gore, but no new ideas and the viewer painfully misses the charm, the fun, the soul and heart of the original version. This does not mean that the idea isn't still strong, but the original version is just a lot better. But as with all things: in the end it is a matter of taste and therefore there will be and should be fans for each version. I, personally, e.g., prefer the US-Version of Being Human, which is criticized by many fans of the original. I think the creators of the remake made great casting decisions in this case and the US-version has (still) a lot of soul and fun and charm. This is not (and cannot be) true in the case of Life on Mars - if something is this perfect, why change it? It is not 60 years old and outdated and even the language (and pretty much of the culture) is the same, so why bother and make things worse? So: the new Primeval has nothing on the original, but the idea is still strong and tastes differ, so a well-meant 6.

Please give this show a chance, a lot of the reviews to date are overly judgmental and biased, unfairly in my eyes. Do not dismiss this because it is a one of those shows which will grow on you, and the ending to this series is sensational, and very unexpected. The production team and values are the same as the original, which is brilliant. They have managed to maintain the spirit of the original version, and make the series equally as good as the British show. I speak as a humble Brit too. The characters are rounded and well acted. Clearly a lot of time and effort went into the values of maintaining the integrity of the original show, but also making it more grown up. Nice to see the series running longer too. A lucky 13 episodes in this series which I hope will lead to another series or five.

Primeval started in 2007 and went for five seasons; The show opened up a great universe full on interesting stories that could be explored. Primeval: New World has picked one of those promising stories. It isn't the best show ever but it has the potential to be a great show, the original series took a few episodes to fully expand its potential and this show has definitely started doing that. It has an interesting array of characters,also has an interesting connection to the original and that story line will be great when it fully comes up. So Primeval: New World has some short comings but it has just started but it has a great potential and will no doubt get better and better through each episode. Recommend a watch.

I felt this was a good North American transfer of an English television series. The appearance of the character Temple from the original series helped the integration into this series for myself.

As spin offs go this one does a good job of following in the originals path but making sure it isn't a copy of it.

If you expect this to be exactly like the original then I am sorry it isn't and its all the better for that. I wouldn't say it is as good as the original Primeval however it is a solid addition to the world.

It's emotional, exciting, and decently acted. Test it out yourself.

GLHF. Hope you enjoy the show.

After the original Primeval was cancelled for a second time in the UK, Impossible Pictures turned to the international market to keep the show alive. In late 2012 we got Primeval: New World, a North American spin-off of the show that takes the action from London (and Dublin) to the rugged landscape of Vancouver.

I appreciate that New World is a spin-off rather than a complete reboot or remake of the series, though it largely ignores the events of Series 5 of the original show with only a short appearance of Connor and a nod to the ARC to tie the two shows together. As a result it's unclear if New World can be considered part of the same continuity or not.

The first (and only) season is 13 episodes long, making it even longer than Series 3 of the original show. This is not necessarily a good thing as it results in a lot of episodes feeling unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. It takes until episode 5 for the show to get going and until episode 8 for it to start getting good. I can't help but feel that cutting a lot of the earlier episodes would make the show more engaging and help the story flow better, especially when you consider that the first series of the original show managed to achieve far more in only six episodes.

The characters are fine and the actors do a good job playing them but they're not quite as memorable as the characters from the original. The standout characters for me are Mac Rendell who brings some familiarity with his British accent and Becker-like personality, and Lt. Ken Leeds who has some fun comedic moments and constantly tries to convince team leader Evan Cross that he's there to help, to no avail.

The creatures for me were a bit of a disappointment. Unlike the original show which made the effort to use varied and unique creatures in each episode, New World instead opts for using mostly generic dinosaurs. It may just be because of the higher resolution but the CGI creatures also didn't feel as convincing as they did in the original.

Overall Primeval: New World is a fine show and worth watching if you're desperate for more Primeval content but it lacks the heart and story that made the original work. It seemed to be getting somewhere with it's last few episodes and could have improved in subsequent seasons but as the show met the same fate as the original, I guess we'll never know.

As you can probably guess, the huge success of the hit British programme is what eventually lead to this foreign spin-off happening. The series has quite an ensemble cast of well-known Canadian actors who all did a decent job with the source material they where given to work with and I'd also say the showrunners pretty much pulled off adapting it faithfully for a new audience overseas in North America.

The CGI animation on the models has slightly improved since the later seasons of the original series and the prehistoric creatures themselves are portrayed in a more realistic manner with behavioural traits of wild animal in the real-world, which is unlike how they were shown previously in the UK version (something I find to be a refreshing change of pace), having almost always been represented to the TV viewing audience in the past as hyperactive carnivores equipped with "exaggerated predatory features", while half the time they're literally bouncing off the sides of walls (not so much grounded in reality). Mind you, the sound design could've been better.

It seems like rather a fitting choice for Albertosaurus to be the main antagonistic creature for the series, as they were actually native to Canada 70 million years ago and I especially loved the little added details on its design, like for instance the deformed arm and slashes along its body help to make it stand out as being more "significant" to the show's overall storyline than some of the other creatures are.

A criticism I have to make would be the fact there where no creatures depicted from the future in any of the episodes and that really just goes to show how the behind-the-scenes production team lacked imaginative thinking, since Impossible Pictures was way better at that sort of stuff when it came to creating what a speculative piece of futuristic evolution would look like.

I absolutely HATE cliffhangers because of this and the original show, they never manage to get resolved! The entire series as a whole had a lot of potential to be just as good as the original because even though it started off feeling a little bit repetitive of what's come before, by the end it really started to pick up the pace. It's a real shame it didn't get the chance to continue and conclude (or at least partially wrap up) the story they had already established.

While it's nowhere near as great as the original show, I'd still take watching this any day over seasons 4 and 5 of the original series (I think I'd rank it higher than the both of them combined).

The original UK *Primeval* remains to this day one of my favorite guilty pleasures. And while some of the characters in that version left me a bit cold, and I found the ups and downs caused by poor network treatment frustrating, I never tired of the dry humor or complicated and mixed character motivations as they battled anomalies, creatures, and humans determined to use both to achieve greater power. The situations created suspense: You were always wondering how they were going to get out of this week's predicament. In this version, the motives are straightforward, all goodness all the time: Save the modern world from time anomalies and creatures that arrive through them. These creatures often predate humans, and, being out of place, generally cause trouble, including approaching humans an interesting new prey species. The problem I have is that we have not yet (as of July 2013 on the SyFy run of the first season) been given a clear reason as to why these particular characters are doing this; there is very little to motivate them to do this work, and the context does not make the need for them doing it particularly critical nor gripping. There's no scientific researcher like Cutter, driven by pure scientific curiosity about the phenomenon, just a entrepreneur who lost a loved one to an anomaly creature and who finds the experience an adrenaline rush. We have no sense of what he hopes to achieve long-term. There are no hard-core nerds like Connor, no animal lovers like Abby, and apparently no interest in obtaining the tech that enabled the UK team to put anomalies in a holding pattern to prevent more wayward creatures from getting lost in the wrong time (while of course dealing with those that had slipped through before they could be stopped). (Which means there is always at least one character left "guarding" the anomaly. Boring....) And when this team discusses tech, it's in the context of the tech expert providing a nice app for their phone as a done deal, whereas the process of creating tech in the original was suspenseful: Will it work, will it help, how much does it need to be tweaked, etc. Sometimes tech failures contributed to the action.

So every week we're introduced to a new creature that must be returned to its time, and we watch the characters do relatively boring things to figure out how to accomplish this. Civilians are tangentially involved, but with the exception of one episode, rarely do we see their involvement in any depth. (And that episode's civilian was not depicted in a manner that even made us worry about her or collateral damage in general, as we always did in the original, which even included a character who had grown to adulthood by traveling through alternate times after being drawn into an anomaly as a child.) Meanwhile, as the creatures are being tracked, the characters tell us their life stories, which gets very old very quickly. (Seriously, why would we be interested, beyond the basic reason they're involved in the first place? Backstories are for storyboards to guide the actions of a character in the current situation, but it's the current situation where the focus for the audience exists.) For example, in an episode that should've ratcheted the suspense to the rafters, main characters being stalked by raptors similar to the velociraptors of Jurassic Park, we're being bored to death listening to one character talk to two others about their feelings about the death of loved ones. The ultimate capture was so anti-climatic, it was hard to believe they were in any danger to begin with. And there is no "big bad" here, either, a character with a hidden agenda, wanting to use the phenomenon to achieve bigger goals, like the original's Helen Cutter and her first quest to start a prehistoric zoo, and then ultimately end humanity because humanity was destroying the planet. (Granted, her character was a bit of a mess, but at least she kept things interesting, and kept viewers guessing.) While the butterfly effect is alluded to, no one seems particularly interested in either changing history, nor showing concern that others might want to.

Ultimately, even if they want to limit this version to a weekly creature feature, they need to up the action, reduce the chit-chat, and make the process of capturing the creatures suspenseful. If they really want to make this sci-fi in the tradition that the original followed, they need far more depth to the characters and the stories. The UK *Primeval* was not a perfect show by any means, but by comparison to this show, it was imaginative and action-packed. It's as if these showrunners have found a formula and are sticking to it, even if it is boring as hell.

There is potential here. The actors are good, and the characters have the potential to be interesting. Now they need to add more imagination, suspense, and action. i.e., they should ask themselves the question that it was clear the original's creators asked, what would I do if I were in this situation? It is, after all the question that every good sci-fi story wants its audience to ask.

It's not surprising that the show was cancelled. Unfortunately.

The viewership was low probably because the writing wasn't very good. The storyline and characters were were fine.

It just wasn't written well.

The screenplay was not thorough with the subplots and characters.

It's really too bad. I like shows like this.

Next time try better writing, directing and production.

Looks like I'll be checking out the original British version which is much more highly reviewed. As can be seen by the number of seasons.

Of course British television is going to be different. They always are. But they have improved quite a bit in recent years.

The BEST thing about Primeval: New World is that it shows how brilliant the ORIGINAL Primeval series is. The original is like your favorite childhood desert, so tasty and flavorful. Now, as an adult, you find that while someone has resurrected the brand, it's now just bland and nothing special.

In New World, the main character is Evan Cross, the team LEADER, unlike the original where Conner, the sidekick, is the protagonist. Except for the "pocket change" appearance of Conner in the 1st episode, the surviving original cast are nowhere to be seen, nor are any story lines carried forward. New World is "leader centric" - everything revolves around Evan, so no risk of anything happening to him... Yawn.

The series does pick up (trudging through 8 episodes), and episode 8 does have a nice twist, unlike the original where a number of episodes had "nice" twists. Here, most episodes are "cookie cutter": man-eating creature {fill in the blank name} comes through, causes havoc, and must be returned to its own time. Yawn.

What you don't see is the humor of the original: James Lester is SORELY missed. The Conner/Abby relationship interest is replaced by a triangle (or should that be quadrangle if you don't exclude the dead), but the situations merely serve as pauses between the man-eating dino's (as in CGI is expensive, and we need to have 45 minutes in an episode, so...). Yawn.

Again, where the original had an arc, a sense of direction carried through multiple seasons, a PLAN (I imagine the creators had a notebook with a design of where they wanted to be at the end of each season, for a number of seasons, with directions of how to get there), New World's playbook seems to be "Let's make Season ONE, and we'll worry about subsequent seasons IF we're renewed. It seems that a shorter season (original) IS better than a longer season (New World).

So maybe it'll pick up after the Christmas break. It is worth slogging through the season so far just in case. Consider it an "ironing" program - you know, something that you can watch while you iron, distracting, but not something you have to, nor want to, devote full attention to. (Maybe that's their market: an audience wrapped up in texting, checking e-mail, needing noise as background).

I've read all reviews of this series here and it baffles me how most are premature often after 3 to 6 episodes. Which, as I just finished watching the first season. And some even expect a carbon copy from spin-off. Also some people questioned why they didn't see any effect from the whole anomaly apocalypse from the original series, but its been suggested in the new world that the shows don't run in the same time or that it might be an alternative reality (both were established realities in the original series).

The first half of the season was clearly made to get people in to the universe who weren't before. They are great episodes for dino-hunting but not really great if you watched the original series because you then already know the rules of the universe. But it not like they are not fun to watch, just no great for a set-up for a story arc.

The second half of the season was far more based around a story arc, while still keeping the feel it set out in the first part of the season, which is great. It quickly became more a complex story arc and started to show how an ARC-like company is being set up in Canada, something you didn't see in the original series as there it came from nowhere.