With Primal Season 3 just two months away, excitement is building for the bold new direction of Genndy Tartakovsky’s award-winning adult animated series.
When Primal Season 2 ended with Spear’s death, Tartakovsky initially revealed plans to shift the show into an anthology format that would preserve the show's motif of visceral animation, dialogue-free storytelling, and award-winning sound design, while exploring entirely new characters and settings.
Episode 5 of Season 2, “The Primal Theory,” served as a test run for this concept. Set in 1890s England, the standalone story followed a brutish and deranged escapee from an asylum who runs afoul of a group of scientific gentleman elites, showcasing how Primal’s trademark intensity could be applied to a different setting and cast of characters.
However, in a recent interview with Collider, Tartakovsky explained why he ultimately changed course during Season 3’s development, choosing to return the series’ focus to Spear and Fang instead of pursuing the anthology format.
Said Tartakovsky, "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."
Speaking on Spear becoming a zombie, Tartakovsky added, "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."
The teaser trailer makes it clear that despite Spear’s shocking return as a zombie, Primal Season 3 isn’t straying from what made the series a standout. Fans can still expect the same raw, unflinching violence, minimalist storytelling, and immersive, award-winning sound design that define Genndy Tartakovsky’s prehistoric epic.
Though Tartakovsky has kept most story details under wraps, he did reveal that Spear and Fang’s offspring will appear in the new season and play a pivotal role in the upcoming season.