The British sci-fi adventure series “Primeval” tends to be pitched as “Jurassic Park meets ‘The X-Files,’” but that makes it sound grander and scarier than it actually is. It’s more like a 1960s Irwin Allen gee-whiz show like “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” combined with the artful-but-still-fakey creature effects from a Ray Harryhausen movie like The Valley of Gwangi (which pit cowboys against dinosaurs). “Primeval” aired from 2007-2009 and features computer-generated prehistoric monsters, but the cheese factor gives it almost a retro feel that’s not entirely intentional.
The “Primeval” Vol. 2 DVD set dropped on Sep. 15 and presents the show at both its best and worst. Confusingly, the Volume 1 DVD contained the show’s first two seasons, while Volume 2 features the 10 episodes of “Primeval’s” third and likely final season. “Primeval’s” last season improves on its first, but falls conspicuously short of the bar set by its imaginative contemporaries as “Torchwood” or “Fringe,” and seems positively unevolved compared to the writing on “Lost” or “Battlestar Galactica.”
AMC’s “Breaking Bad” airs the finale of its second season on Sunday night. My wife and I just watched the first three episodes of its first season over Memorial Day weekend, and man oh man, is it ever good. I initially resisted the show because it sounded a little too much like Showtime’s “Weeds” — both involve the darkly comic collision of drug culture and middle-class family life in a Southwestern U.S. suburb. But where “Weeds” always struck me as smug and full of itself, “Breaking Bad” has proven to be both more humanistic and more harrowing, with suspense scenes nearly worthy of Alfred Hitchcock. Bryan Cranston fully deserves all the acclaim he’s won as a cancer-stricken chemistry teacher who begins cooking meth to provide for his family.
I’ll finish up “Breaking Bad’s” first season soon enough, and will have a hankering for another show. It’s the perfect time to start, since “Battlestar Galactica” is finished, “Lost” won’t be back until 2010 and the networks are in summer reruns (assuming that concept has meaning any more). So which show should I start in on? Ideally, it’ll be something that we can watch on DVD, because we don’t have cable and, as much as I like Hulu, I’d rather not commit to an hour-long program I can only see on the Internet. Here are some under consideration, with their potential pros and cons:
“Dexter” (Showtime) – Michael C. Hall series about the serial killer who kills other serial killers. Pros: I liked Hall a lot on “Six Feet Under,” and he’s supposed to be terrific, while playing a diametrically opposite role. Cons: The premise sounds pretty lurid and contrived. Also, it would be a hard sell to watch with my wife, who’s squeamish about violence. (Which, admittedly, never stopped her from watching “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood,” “Rome” or “Breaking Bad,” for that matter.)
“Party Down” (Starz) – New sitcom about caterers, starring hilarious people like Martin Starr and Jane Lynch Pros: It looks like a lot of fun. Cons: It’s so new, it’s not on DVD yet.
