Genndy Tartakovsky Dives into PRIMAL Season 3’s Pivot From Anthology Format to Zombies
With Primal Season 3 just two months away, fans are bracing for a thrilling new chapter in Genndy Tartakovsky’s brutal, dialogue-free animated epic. But, the upcoming season isn’t just another round of prehistoric mayhem, it’s taking a wild turn into zombie territory.
When Primal Season 2 wrapped with the tragic death of Spear, Tartakovsky had teased that the next season would reinvent the series as an anthology, focusing on new characters and settings while keeping the show’s visceral animation and raw, emotional storytelling intact.
Episode 5 of Season 2, “The Primal Theory,” even served as a prototype for this direction, swapping dinosaurs for Victorian-era madness as an escaped asylum inmate clashed with a group of scientists in 1890s England.
But as development on Season 3 progressed, Tartakovsky found himself drawn back to the characters that started it all. In a recent interview with Collider, he explained why the anthology idea didn’t stick.
“At the end of Season 2, I talked about Primal becoming an anthology. So, it's going to be different characters, different everything, just following the core idea of Primal, which is not a lot of dialogue. It's visual storytelling. It's visceral. It's raw.
“After developing for a little bit, I realized I missed Spear, and I spent 20 episodes having the public love him and having the audience really like the relationship with him and Fang. And then an idea sparked that I could do more, and Spear became a zombie.”
Tartakovsky is taking the prehistoric warrior into undead territory, though he insists this isn’t your typical zombie story.
“I feel like there's a lot of new and there are a lot of established zombie things. I'm not a horror guy, right? I actually don't watch horror films. I don't like to be scared, so it was funny for me to do Primal as a show anyway, because there are a lot of, I call them more thriller-type feels, right?
“It's more of a thriller, dramatic, emotional show than just the scares. So, this is kind of following that same rule. There are zombie movies that I like, you know, World War Z, I like The Last of Us, all that stuff, but I think we established our own rules, while at the same time, not breaking all the laws that we kind of associate with zombies.”
It’s an unexpected direction for Primal, but it’s awesome and I love the concept! The idea of merging the show’s prehistoric savagery with a new supernatural twist has fans excited to see how Spear and Fang’s story continues beyond death.
Primal Season 3 is shaping up to be something entirely new while keeping the same raw spirit that made the series unforgettable.