Brave New World Or Bland New World?

Saw the first episode of Primeval: New World and it wasn't as crappy as I feared it would be.

That's not to say it was great - far from it - but then the original Primeval was pretty much mockable car-crash TV for its first season.

The only thing that had going for it was frequent gratuitous scenes of uberspunky pixie Hannah Spearritt cavorting around her character's apartment in her underwear.

However, from the second season onwards the show went from strength-to-strength (sadly the saucy Spearritt moments were phased out) and, much like Merlin (which also had a stinker of a first season), Primeval became must-see TV.

However, does Primeval: New World deserve this grace period? In a very real sense it's not a new show, just a new season - with a totally different cast - of an established show.

The pilot episode didn't start too promisingly, and several of the supporting cast are truly bland, but as things progressed it began to find its feet.

This episode saw Connor Temple (Andrew Lee Potts), from the original British show, coming to Vancouver to recover an "anomaly detecting device" that had fallen into the hands of scientist Evan Cross (Eureka's Niall Matter). Cross had got his hands on the device when he and his wife stumbled up an an anomaly and she was killed by a dinosaur that had emerged from it.

Cross appears to have not only purchased the abandoned warehouse where this event took place (surely the police were suspicious of this? A man's wife is killed mysteriously after breaking into an abandoned warehouse and then he buys the building and converts it into his own office space?) but has spent the last six years chasing anomalies, without really knowing what they are.

For new viewers - which presumably the Canadian show is seeking to attract - Connor's role in things isn't made particularly clear, except to hint that he is somehow connected with the 'dead'(?) Anomaly Research Centre agent Cross also found when his wife got eaten by a T-Rex. Presumably this will be explained later in the series, even though - as far as I am aware - none of the other original cast are scheduled to appear in New World.

Cross has assembled a rather rag-tag team of confidantes to help him in his quest to understand these anomalies, but the only really interesting character - who comes on the scene quite late in the day - is Geoff Gustafson as the rather Fox Mulder-ish Lieutenant Ken Leeds: a Royal Canadian Air Force officer and sole remaining operative of the government's Project Magnet (which is, apparently, a real thing).

Admittedly, Leeds is a quite stereotypical, dishevelled "eccentric" character, but I'm a sucker for those, having an obvious geeky empathy for such people.