Doomed, Again, by the Space-Time Continuum
ITV/Impossible Pictures
Juliet Aubrey and Douglas Henshall in "Primeval," a new BBC America science-fiction series that has its debut on Saturday.
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
Published: August 7, 2008
Over the past few years BBC America has emerged second only to the Sci-Fi Channel as the television outlet most committed to covering all the inconveniences that time travel can produce. It has brought us "Life on Mars," a revised "Doctor Who," and its spinoff, "Torchwood," as if to say, "And you thought airport security lines were a big drag!" British science-fiction television allows for plenty of American cultural imperiousness. The camp factor churned out is fairly high, and with "Primeval," a new series starting Saturday on BBC America, it climbs up Big Ben and right on over the top of the London Eye.
"Primeval" imagines an England threatened by creatures hundreds of millions of years old that look an awful lot like overgrown leftovers from a dinner at Red Lobster. How do they make it to the present day? Well, they're not taking Virgin Atlantic. They are careering through tears in the space-time continuum, and then ravaging their way through the London Underground and suburban housing developments and eating people in public swimming pools. (I wish for once that a space-time hole could deliver someone nice, this time from the future; someone who could show everybody how to eat a whole lemon meringue pie and still lose six pounds by the next day.)
The holes go by the name of anomalies here, and they look vaguely like shattering ice sculptures. Rip through the space-time rift, and you will find yourself at a wedding at Leonard's of Great Neck.
There are good guys and there are bad guys, and they are all fairly easy to pinpoint with the sound off. Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall) is an evolutionary zoologist who, with his team of acolytes and Indiana Jones outfits, is battling the looming national crisis and trying to figure out what his scientist wife (Juliet Aubrey) is doing back from what he thought was the dead. She's been gone eight years, and when he greets her again — thank you, tear in the space-time continuum — they both behave as if one or the other merely spent too much time going out for a bagel. Don't expect any of the racy sex from "Torchwood."
But do expect other varieties of derivative silliness. Working against Cutter's interest are bureaucratic cronies in the Home Office who most of all want to avert a public-relations disaster by keeping the good people of Britain in the dark about all the paleontological terror. James Lester (Ben Miller) wants to throw an innocent woman in prison for the killing of a man chewed up and spit out by a prehistoric shark. The sense of Lester's evil is largely conveyed by his lantern jaw and further depicted by lines like this: "The correct decision is often painful. That's the burden of government."
Maybe "Primeval" wants to serve as an exploration of the People's Right to Know. Or maybe it wants to give rise to its own theme parks.
But it definitely won't make you forget about "Lost."
PRIMEVAL
BBC America, Saturday nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8 Central time.
Created by Tim Haines and Adrian Hodges; Mr. Haines, executive producer; Mr. Hodges, lead writer; directed by Cilla Ware; Cameron McAllister, producer. An Impossible Pictures production for ITV/ProSieben/M6.
WITH: Douglas Henshall (Professor Nick Cutter), James Murray (Stephen Hart), Andrew-Lee Potts (Connor Temple), Lucy Brown (Claudia Brown), Hannah Spearritt (Abby Maitland), Juliet Aubrey (Helen Cutter), Ben Miller (James Lester) and Mark Wakeling (Tom Ryan).
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/arts/television/08prim.html
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