BY DAVID KRONKE >TV CRITIC

BBC America has some brass to premiere a show during the Olympics, and not just any show but a splashy, big-budget series about dinosaurs and other critters from the past terrorizing our present.

"Primeval," which has been given the time slot formerly occupied by "Torchwood," BBC America's all-time highest-rated show, feels a lot like that program - it's fast-paced, cheeky and features a lot of (too much?) inter-clique romantic intrigue. If it's not quite as tartly scripted or as urgently apocalyptic (after four episodes made available, at least; that looks like it will change) as "Torchwood" and settles for certain narrative conventions that "Torchwood" gleefully eschewed, it's still plenty of fun.

Our old narrative pal, the temporal anomaly, is "Primeval's" jumping-off point. Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall) is an evolutionary zoologist whose scientist wife disappeared eight years prior. He, his assistant Stephan Hart (James Murray) and a geeky fanboy though ostensibly high-IQ student named Connor (Andrew-Lee Potts) are summoned by Claudia Brown (Lucy Brown, no relation), a Home Office operative, to investigate reports of odd creatures wandering the same location where Cutter's wife disappeared.

Reptile expert Abby Maitland (Hannah Spearritt) just happens to be wandering the woods in search of the same critters. Claudia would prefer Cutter summarily debunk the reports, but when they find a dead steer in a tree, that becomes a little problematic, and when they get chased around by a ravenous Gorgonopsid, it becomes impossible.

They locate a temporal anomaly and venture hundreds of millions of years into the past, where Cutter discovers his wife's camera next to a skeleton. (It's a man's, Cutter quickly asserts, but doesn't ever seem to consider the implications that it's not his wife.)

"Everything we know about the universe is wrong," Cutter dramatically intones. "This is far from over."

Well, of course, it's far from over; we have a whole season of episodes to deal with. Turns out there are a scad of these temporal anomalies, and apparently prehistoric creatures are far better at discovering them and traveling through them than we clueless humans.

Next week, they must contend with an army of creepy, venomous bugs the size of bassinets and a killer centipede that could swallow five or six grown men whole (for arachnophobes, this episode is a queasy delight). Future episodes feature man-eating sea monsters and dodos that would be cute - if they weren't hosting some particularly nasty parasites.

Some plot devices can be head-scratchers, and while dialogue is generally pithy, at times, it's also kind of hokey. Lines like, "He may be a little unconventional in his methods, but he's the closest thing we have to an expert" and "I offer you the key to time, and you turn your back on it" are as clunky as they read. Claudia's boss is pretty much a cardboard wormy villain, though Ben Miller gives him a droll demeanor.

And the romantic complications threaten to become tiresome if they're not acted upon, and quick: Connor (he and his equally nerdy pals are the most annoying characters here) is sweet on Abby, who's hot for Stephen, who's otherwise spoken for, or maybe not. Claudia is drawn to Cutter, who still pines for his wife (Juliet Miller) even though she's left him in the lurch for eight years and may have some sinister scheme in mind.

The creature effects are pretty good by TV standards, which means they're still not terribly persuasive. Still, "Primeval" is nonstop fun, exciting, reasonably smart and agreeably silly all at once.

Give BBC America a gold medal for having the guts to counter-program against the Olympics with such an invigorating action show that the broadcast networks would kill to have it.

David Kronke, (818) 713-3638 david.kronke@dailynews.com

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