PRIMAL is the TV Show We Need Right Now

There's this remarkable cold open in episode three of animator Genndy Tartakovsky's adult animation show, Primal. A pack of wooly mammoths trudges through a blizzard in a storming tundra; unbeknownst to them, an older mammoth lags behind. The elder is missing a tusk, his fur is raggedy to the point of being threadbare, and his eyes betray an exhaustion not present in the others. He becomes separated from his pack without them noticing.

The mammoth lets out a bellow, but it goes unanswered.

After the blizzard breaks, the mammoth is attacked by the show's wordless odd-couple protagonists: the caveman Spear who wields his namesake, and the T-Rex known as Fang. Robert E. Howard fans will catch the references.

The mammoth fights back, but is overpowered by the two hunters. As his trunk lets out gasps of air, Spear raises a rock above his head. He looks into the mammoth's yellow eye and delivers the killing blow. But after the mammoth goes limp, Spear does something surprising. He places his hand gently on the mammoth's side and sees himself reflected in the eye as it closes. He stands there pensively for a moment before making himself a cloak out of the fur.

I tell you with no shame, I cried. And it was like seven minutes into the episode.

"A Cold Death," the title of this episode, is a very good episode of Primal, but it's not an unusual episode of Primal. This is a fantastic TV show that feels like the antithesis to the current media landscape. It's the kind of show we need right now.

People not so long ago used to use the phrase "the attention economy." Everyone wants your attention: your phone, your television, your radio, your game consoles, and they're all fighting for it. Just ten or so years later, that term feels painfully outdated. These days, it feels like nobody really wants your attention.

Netflix makes "second-screen content" to play idly in the background while you scroll Facebook for the hundredth time today. People are generating AI content that kind of looks like a real thing if you don't glance at it too hard, but the longer you look, the more horrifying it becomes. And the movie theater feels like it is in its final hours as nobody seems to want to give themselves over to the theater experience anymore.

I'm as guilty of this as anybody. My wife will give me a hard time as she sees that even though I'm playing a PS5 game, my laptop is also set up so that I can watch a movie, but my phone magically teleports itself to my hand during loading screens. I'm paying attention to everything, but in actuality, nothing.

---

Primal is currently part of my cure for what ails. The show is silent, meaning it has a "storyboarder" rather than a writer. Spear and Fang, unlikely partners, traverse a fantastic anachronistic landscape together, with each episode largely being its own story disconnected to other installments.

The fact that it's silent- I mean, it's very loud at times, but has almost no spoken dialogue- is one of its secret weapons. It demands your attention. If you try to watch Instagram reels while it plays in the background, you will miss the entire thing. Once the show has your attention, I promise you that it will hold it. The animation is a gorgeous hand-drawn affair with classic painted backgrounds and thick, sometimes ragged outlines on characters. Those characters, whether they be dinosaurs, monsters, or humans, are all incredibly expressive. I suppose you would have to be if it's the only tool you have to convey emotion. Spear is blocky and bottom-heavy with nothing but screams and his face to express himself. Fang uses her whole, long body and keen nose to interact with the world, creating an entirely different mode from Spear.

Primal is a profoundly human show despite very few of its characters being actual humans. It is very violent, yes, with its crimson blood-splatters and brutal fight scenes, but it is also frequently sweet, sad, funny, and contemplative. You very quickly see the humanity in both Spear's human family and Fang's dinosaur kids as each episode invites you to sit silently and really go somewhere with it.

---

Later on in that episode, the mammoth kill scene plays back again almost exactly, except this time, it's Spear and his son hunting a primordial deer. Spear's son looks into the deer's eye as it dies, the same way Spear did with the mammoth. Both of them take a moment to feel what they're doing for a second and we see that this event is a common event for the cavemen. It's the way of their world, but that doesn't render it devoid of meaning. It's a lot more than you might expect from a cartoon.

The third season begins premiering in about a month, and I can't wait to watch it.