During a career-spanning interview ahead of the 2019 premiere of Primal, animator Genndy Tartakovsky admitted to Polygon that he had a singular ambition: “I want to be the best.” He wanted his shows to connect with big audiences, he wanted to surprise them with every turn, and he wanted to make it splashy as hell every single time.
So maybe it’s not a surprise that, after a three-year hiatus, Primal has returned looking like a totally different show that still remains in the spirit of Tartakovsky’s original pulpy vision. He will always swing.
“It’s not a reboot,” Tartakovsky told Polygon ahead of his 2025 New York Comic Con panel. “This is a complete continuation of the story.”
Still, the teaser trailer for Primal season 3 takes a hard left turn from where Tartakovsky left off. Season 2 ended with the death of the show’s hero, Spear, and a flash-forward reveal that his partner, Mira, had a daughter — one who clearly inherited her father’s ferocity. But none of that narrative thread is present in the trailer. Instead, Tartakovsky delivers something far weirder: a zombie Spear.
The trailer leans fully into nightmare logic and, ahem, primal horror. We see an undead Spear clashing with fanged-helmeted skeleton warriors, brawling with a blood-drenched demon cat, and sprinting from a Shai-Hulud. Toward the end, he appears to be on a spirit journey in the desert, where he meets a… giant fly? Between a glimpse of Gollum-like creatures gnawing on human remains and Zombie Spear bashing a lion’s face in, every frame drips with pulp violence and psychedelic dread.
For fans wondering what happened to Mira and her daughter — who seemed poised to carry the series forward — Tartakovsky says not to stress, but maybe let go of that possibility too. “Don’t cling to [the scene] too tight,” he said, adding, “but it’s all canon. Everything makes sense. I’m not rewriting history.”
Before landing on the direction for season 3, Tartakovsky was already aiming to reinvent Primal. “I thought I would do an anthology,” he said. “Primal is the brand, and then here’s a new subheading. I started developing new things… but it didn’t click.” He had toyed with a creation myth arc — something alien, yet inspired by Adam and Eve — but he could never draw it into existence. Plus, the love he (and his audience) had for Spear continued to gnaw at him. Then… “All of a sudden this idea popped into my head […] and I wrote down eight episodes instantly.”
An undead Spear came naturally from the foundation of Primal. Tartakovsky felt that the season 1 episode “Plague of Madness,” which involved a zombie dinosaur, gave him creative permission to resurrect his caveman warrior. “This happens in this world,” he said, careful not to spoil how it’ll all come together in the season 3 premiere.
In a media landscape where animated projects can vanish overnight, Primal’s return was far from a given. Tartakovsky credits Adult Swim and his long-term relationships at Cartoon Network for helping the series survive turbulent times at Warner Bros. “A third season is easy — it’s just finding the money, which is more difficult nowadays,” he says. He knows the struggle well. As he premieres the first look at Primal season 3, he’s also fighting an uphill battle to get his long-gestating film Black Knight made at Sony. In recent days, he’s turned to leaking clips of test animation just to get notice. In a way, Primal season 3 coming back — and going this hard — feels like a miracle.
While the future of Cartoon Network and Adult Swim remains hazy — especially after recent corporate shake-ups and a potential acquisition by an increasingly vast media empire — Tartakovsky seems content to ignore the noise. That’s how you “be the best” in the end.
“I am head-down in that situation. It’s all above me,” he said. “I’m a content creator, and so whoever’s my boss, as long as they like what I do, that’s what I need to focus on.”
According to the trailer, Primal season 3 arrives January 2026.
