‘Primal’ Creator Genndy Tartakovsky Talks Zombified Season 3

Genndy Tartakovsky is no stranger to taking dinosaur-sized creative swings.

This is the guy who told a mostly non-verbal ronin adventure for kids by way of Cartoon Network’s Samurai Jack. His follow-up to Dexter’s Laboratory proved to be nothing short of groundbreaking animation that not only refused to spoon-feed viewers, but encouraged them to engage with the material on a deeper level. Jack’s quest to vanquish the dark lord Aku wasn’t something you could just have playing in the background.

“You have to have confidence in what you’re doing,” he recently told me over Zoom. “The confidence and the patience to let something linger is one thing … The more I slowed down my timing, the more it was successful. Now, all of a sudden, people have the chance to get more involved.”

As a child of the 1970s, Tartakovsky (whose résumé also includes Sony’s highly successful Hotel Transylvania film franchise) grew up in a time when almost every kid-oriented show “spoke down to us,” he said.

Instead, the boy destined to be an animator gravitated towards earlier animated offerings like Looney Tunes, which was “made for adults, but worked so well for kids as well,” he explained. “By the time we got to Samurai Jack, I wanted to do an action show that actually had action in it and was much more visual … [I said], ’I’m gonna change the whole sensibility of this, make it start to feel a lot different, and trust the audience is going to understand.’”

It’s the same kind of fearless attitude that inspired Tartakovsky to turn Spear, the beloved caveman of his Emmy-winning Adult Swim series Primal, into a semi-mindless zombie for the show’s third season (now airing).

The original plan, he confessed, was to end the muted saga of Spear and his T. rex companion Fang after two outings. But then something happened: Genndy changed his mind. That simple, really. Having killed off the main character at the end of Season 2, however, the creator was backed into a narrative corner.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, sh**. Well, what am I going to do now?’” he remembered. “And then this idea came up of him being a zombie. What resonated with me about it, is it brought in a new emotional aspect [to the story], because it’s the character that we love. He’s back, but in a different form, and will the audience cheer for him to return to who he is, or is this the new future of Spear? So, all those dynamics made it super-interesting and my gut was like, ‘Yeah, this is the way to go with it.’”

Even with our prehistoric protagonist in an advanced state of undead decay (from the jump, a section of Spear’s skull is unceremoniously lopped off, exposing his brain to the elements), Primal continues to deliver on its pulpy premise—a primordial stew seasoned by Frank Frazetta, Spaghetti Westerns, and Conan the Barbarian stories.

“I stirred everything up that’s what vomited out,” Tartakovsky noted with a smile. Influences aside, his main goal with Primal was to make “a whole series just built of these visual storytelling sequences with no dialogue.” Such a philosophy is completely antithetical to a population glued to their screens, only half paying attention. “You can’t do that for Primal,” Tartakovsky. “You’ve got to be all in or you’re not going to get it.”

Still, one could argue the necromantic nature of the third season completely refreshes the overall formula. “Season 3 is [about] finding life through death in a general sense and what that means,” the creator continued. “It’s very character-driven. That’s what I think is successful about it: We took 20 episodes to get these characters to live and breathe, and now we have to cheer for them to find themselves again.”

While the jury is still out on a potential fourth season, Tartakovsky isn’t opposed to continuing the Primal brand to a point where it becomes “everlasting.”

“Whatever we do [with it will be] raw and emotional,” he teased. “Pulpy, 2-D, low dialogue, and visceral, visual storytelling. That becomes what the show is. So, maybe three seasons of something else, or one season, or whatever it is. But I’d love for it to continue. I don’t know yet. It’s too early to tell.”

He already showed just how far the idea could be stretched in Season 2’s “The Primal Theory,” in which Charles Darwin and his Victorian-era colleagues fight off a crazed mental patient in a spooky manor house. Tartakovsky hoped to do something similar in Season 3 with another bottle episode “set in the future,” but the idea was never realized.

“We were trying to make a parallel between Zombie Spear and the culture of people being sheep and just following exactly what is given to them,” he concluded. “Almost like an Orwellian type of feel. And it got to be too big, too much. I’m like, ‘What are we doing? This is going to be hard.’ I decided it was going to break me and the production. I [also] didn’t want it to be a gimmick, so we omitted it.”

New episodes of Primal air on Adult Swim every Sunday at 11 p.m. ET before making their way to HBO Max the following day.