No Who in Primeval

The creators of Primeval, the British time-travel series coming to BBC America, told SCI-FI WIRE that they are trying to shake off any comparisons to the wildly popular Doctor Who.

"It's the one question I've been getting asked about the most: people comparing the show to that Doctor," Douglas Henshall, who stars as an evolutionary zoologist who deals with creatures from the past and the future, said in an interview at the Television Critics Association's press tour in Beverly Hills, Calif., this week.

Of course, comparisons with that other British SF series are inevitable: Primeval counts among its writing staff Paul Cornell, who wrote for the new Doctor Who TV series and authored more than a dozen novels about the Doctor and his companion, Bernice Summerfield.

But don't expect any crossovers with Doctor Who. "No, absolutely not will we have a Doctor Who character pop in on Primeval," producer/writer Tim Haines insisted. "They have very different worlds and realities. Anything can happen on Doctor Who."

The world of Primeval is more reality based, said co-creator Adrian Hodges. But he admitted that he was tempted to sneak in a few Doctor references or inside jokes. "Every time I was tempted to even put in a vague Who reference, I stopped myself," Hodges said. "The worlds are very different. ... At one point, we considered a sly Doctor reference when someone got angry at another character and threw a box set of Doctor Who at them, but we thought not."