Gameograf - Best Chrome Live Wallpaper & HD Wallpapers for New Tab
Bookmark
Home / News / Primal Creator Dishes on Season 3’s Trailer Secrets: “Expect the Unexpected”

Primal Creator Dishes on Season 3’s Trailer Secrets: “Expect the Unexpected”

48
Genndy-Tartakovsky-Primal-Season-3-Adult-Swim.jpg

Genndy Tartakovsky has dropped the first teaser trailer for Primal Season 3 during New York Comic Con 2025, and we got to talk with the creator all about that new trailer and what it means for the season. Adult Swim brought quite a lot to showcase at New York Comic Con this year, and part of their plans was to show off the first look at the highly anticipated third season of Primal. But if you had watched the second season, there are probably a lot of questions swirling in your head about how the series is continuing in the first place.

Primal Season 2 ended in quite a shocking manner that saw one of its main characters killed off, and that seemed to be like a finale for the series overall. But that’s all changed with the first look at Season 3 that not only reveals that —SPOILER— Spear indeed died at the end of Season 2 but that he’s also –SPOILER– returning to the center stage as a magically fueled zombie in Season 3.

ComicBook got the chance to ask series creator Genndy Tartakovsky all about this new reveal and what he could tease for Primal Season 3 ahead of its premiere in January 2026 with Adult Swim, and you can read out chat below (which has been edited for length and clarity).

Genndy Tartakovsky Dishes on Primal Season 3

NICK VALDEZ, COMICBOOK: Congrats on Primal Season 3. I think I can safely say that fans like myself were kind of shocked to see that it was even getting a third season after that finale that seemed so conclusive. But I presume that after this trailer drops, and fans get the first look at Season 3, that there is going to be even more shock. Are we looking at an undead Spear? Is that who we’re dealing with here?

GENNDY TARTAKOVSKY: Yeah, Spear’s a zombie.

I gotta know about the spark of this idea. Did you know going in to the end of Season 2 that you were going to get this third season and continue the story? Or is it more of a situation where you finished Season 2, Season 3 came along, and then this idea sparked from that?

I always talked about wanting Primal to be a “brand” for this type of storytelling. It’s pulpy, not a lot of dialogue, action, dramatic, emotional, right? That’s where it is. I wanted to change up the story, maybe every one, two, three seasons, whatever it was, right? So I thought I was kind of done. Then as I started to develop another idea it wasn’t clicking. I kept in the back of my head…I kept thinking about… because the response was really good to the second season, I was like, “Ugh, what did I do? I just spent 20 episodes trying to get the audience to fall in love with these characters and then I killed one of them.” Which is fine, it was natural. But at the same time, it’s like, “Oh, was there more? Did I call it too early?”

Because for me, I make the shows, and I spend probably 2-3 times as long with it as you do. You watch it for half an hour, and then it’s another year or two before you watch another half. During those 2 years, I’m constantly in this world, making it. So for me, it was like 6 years worth of work feeling like that. Obviously, I enjoyed every minute of it, but…then I saw it thought, “Sh-t, maybe it was too fast.” But I’m in the situation that I’m in. I’m not gonna make this show about [Spear’s] daughter, because it feels too young. It feels like I’m kind of jumping the shark or something. To me, the way I look at it, it would have been fine, but it didn’t feel natural. And it was too expected, even, maybe?

I came upon this idea because in “Plague of Madness,” which is one of the episodes from the first season, we’ve got these crazy, diseased, zombie-like dinosaurs, and I was like, “Wait, this is kind of part of this world, it’s very pulpy.” I wrote down 8 episodes, like that, like in 10 minutes. When that happens, that means this idea is ripe. It’s creatively juicy. Then I trusted my gut, and I talked to Derek and Scott and everybody that works on the show, and they were like, “Yeah, this is amazing.” Then I told Adult Swim about it, and they were super supportive, they loved it, and we got going.

It’s awesome! Once I saw the trailer, it kind of made sense why the logo was green, because is this that same kind of witch’s magic that we’ve been seeing throughout the series?

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

I wanted to ask about the challenge of heading into this third season with an undead Spear. You’ve already faced the challenge of portraying character without dialogue, so now that there is this undead being, how do you find an emotion in that? Do you lean towards aggressiveness? How did you steer the ship?

Well, the best thing about it is I had 20 episodes. That the audience knows who this character is. When you have a character that’s already familiar…like when we started out in Episode 1, you had no clue who this caveman is. So you can’t project anything on him until he lost his kids, right? And the trauma, you’re now starting to understand who he is. So now we’ve got 20 episodes to know who this guy is. And now, he’s not himself, obviously. So, there’s this urgency and drive for the audience, I think, to cheer for him to become Spear again.

It’s very interesting emotionally, because it’s not just a random zombie that we’re following along. It’s our dude. It’s Spear. There’s this hope that…is there a way in science fiction and in pulp that a zombie becomes who he once was? Is that possible? I don’t know. So you start to see, and the way we unfold the story, it’s super emotional, it’s super trippy.

It’s a different type of storytelling, but it’s the same world, same timeline, all those things, so you don’t feel it’s like a reboot. Now we’re doing a “zombie caveman,” you know, which is a great idea too, but we’re not doing that. We’re continuing the story, and this is just what happened to him. Then we explain it, of course which I’m holding off, in the first episode. It’s really fun to watch, because you have this emotional connection. It’s not just a random undead. It’s somebody very specific.

There’s so much I want to ask about the “how,” but I know this is going to be saved for when the show comes out. So it is possible that he might return to being the Spear that we saw before? There is no “never say never” in this kind of world, right? That’s the sense I’m getting from you here.

I think so. I think where we’ve seen magic, and we’ve seen time-traveling witches, and all this stuff, why not? Maybe, I don’t know.

It’s interesting too how you brought up deciding to not follow up with Spear’s daughter, which is something that fans latched onto in that finale with the potential to follow Spear’s family. Even if this new season isn’t necessarily about that, is there a potential that we might visit them some point down the line?

Perhaps? I don’t know. I’m definitely not keen on having the daughter drive the show. I feel like it’s too young, and I feel like there’s a certain adultness to Primal that I want to keep intact. Having it about the daughter’s adventures didn’t feel quite right. Maybe I just haven’t had the right idea of what to do with it.

Now that I’ve seen it, it’s hard to go back after Zombie Spear, so I totally understand it. Fans also appreciated, in Season 2 especially, you had that kind of Victorian era standalone episode, where we got to see a fa point in the future. Is something like that on the table for Season 3? Maybe not even a return to that story in particular, but just seeing other places in this Primal timeline?

I really liked that episode. I know it was controversial sometimes, but I liked it, so we had another one like it. But then it was too big and too sideways. I feel like “The Primal Theory” really connected to what everything around it was at the time. And this one, we couldn’t find the connection. We had so much story to tell that it was like, “You know what? It doesn’t need to be a gimmick.” Like we have to have one of these every series, and so because it’s not organically working, let’s just remove it. It was set in the far, far future. In the 30th century or something crazy. Something to do with humanity and stuff, but we couldn’t figure it out quite right.

Expanding on Primal’s World in Season 3

Logo for Primal Season 3
Courtesy of Adult Swim

That’s the thing I’ve appreciated, too, is that this world keeps expanding. But, as you’ve mentioned, this all happens within this world. Spear in the other seasons did meet warriors from other regions who are also existing at the same time. Is there potential for that here, even when dealing with an undead version of Spear?

Well, the world is still the same, so undead Spear, live Spear, it doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant. We have to imagine this pulp world where you’ve got prehistoric lands…where man lives. Then you have random civilizations that somehow exist at the same timeline, right? And now you have whatever this direction is, right? It’s this crazy pulp world that facilitates it, and because from Episode 1, you’ve got man and dinosaurs, so we know we’re in a different realm of history, right? If anybody writes to me and yells at me for that, it’s like, “Yeah, it’s pulp, it’s not real.” I know that. I understand my history. So, right from Episode 1, it’s pulpy, and till the end of this episode, it’s still the same world. We haven’t traveled anywhere, we haven’t jumped dimensions, it’s all one thing.

This kind of opens up the opportunity for more of the magic parts of the Primal world, and that’s also been a very intriguing aspect you’ve dealt with in the past. Now that we have a supernatural main character, are we going to see more of that supernatural side?

Yeah, I think this third season is probably more like the first season? It’s more “Primally,” where the second season was…there’s definitely more civilization and humanity, and this is kind of going deeper into a darker realm, in a way.

This teaser is already blowing my mind, so I can’t wait to see the whole thing. Did you have anything you want to say to the fans who are heading into Primal Season 3?

Expect the unexpected. It’s a wild ride.

Primal Season 3 will be coming to Adult Swim in January 2026. You can watch the first two seasons now with HBO Max. What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!

Source

 
Report

Comments

This will close in 0 seconds