Long before he was a battle-hardened Viking or an atheistic soldier on a distant planet, Travis Fimmel was jumping off New York City skyscrapers in a pair of very tight jeans.
It was 2003. The WB was desperate to find its next Smallville. The logic seemed airtight: take an iconic, public-domain hero, put him in a modern urban setting, and cast the hottest male model on the planet. Enter the Travis Fimmel Tarzan era. It was a show that everyone saw on billboards but almost no one actually watched.
Honestly, if you look back at the DNA of this series, it’s a miracle it even exists. You have Eric Kripke—the guy who later gave us Supernatural and The Boys—trying to figure out how to write television. You have Sarah Wayne Callies, years before The Walking Dead, playing a detective who finds a feral man in a Brooklyn warehouse. It was weird. It was moody. And it was cancelled so fast it barely left a footprint in the cultural mud.
Why the Travis Fimmel Tarzan Series Still Matters
Most people remember Travis Fimmel as the face of Calvin Klein. That six-figure deal made him a global icon before he ever spoke a line of dialogue. When the Travis Fimmel Tarzan show was announced, the marketing was aggressive. His face was everywhere. But the show itself? It was a strange hybrid of a police procedural and a family dynasty drama.
The plot kicked off with John Clayton (Fimmel) being "rescued" from the African jungle by his billionaire uncle, Richard Clayton. Richard was played by Mitch Pileggi, whom most of us know as Skinner from The X-Files. He brought that same intensity, but this time as a CEO who wanted to "civilize" his nephew to protect the family’s Greystoke Industries stock.
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It wasn't a jungle adventure. It was a concrete jungle mystery.
Tarzan spent most of his time escaping his uncle's high-tech penthouse to help Detective Jane Porter solve crimes. It sounds like a parody now, but at the time, the WB was leaning hard into the "brooding outsider" trope. The chemistry between Fimmel and Callies was actually decent, but the scripts were... well, they were a "hell ride," as Kripke himself later put it.
The Kripke Connection and Production Chaos
Eric Kripke has been very vocal about how much of a struggle this show was. In various interviews, he’s admitted that he wrote a great pilot—which was basically a 50-page self-contained movie—and then realized he had no idea what to do for episode two.
- The Pilot: Directed by David Nutter (the guy who directed the "Red Wedding" in Game of Thrones). It was slick and expensive.
- The Struggle: After the pilot, the show lost its direction. Was it a romance? A crime show? A corporate thriller?
- The Casting: Beyond Fimmel and Callies, the show had Lucy Lawless (Xena) as Tarzan's aunt. That’s a powerhouse cast for a show that only lasted eight episodes.
Travis Fimmel did most of his own stunts. He was literally barefoot on the streets of New York (or a Toronto set dressed as New York) because he hated shoes. That’s not a character choice; Fimmel famously prefers being barefoot in real life too.
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What Went Wrong?
The show was essentially "The Fugitive" with more pectoral muscles.
Critics at the time were brutal. The USA Today review famously summed it up with: "Him Tarzan, me bored." While the action was actually quite good for 2003 TV, the procedural elements felt forced. One week Tarzan is taking down an arsonist, the next he’s fighting off his uncle's security team.
There was a fundamental disconnect. People wanted the jungle. They wanted the loincloth. They got a guy in a hoodie dodging traffic in Manhattan.
The WB pulled the plug after just eight episodes. They didn't even air the full season they had produced. In the landscape of early 2000s television, if you weren't an instant hit like The O.C. or Smallville, you were gone.
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Where Can You Watch It Now?
Finding the Travis Fimmel Tarzan series today is a bit of a scavenger hunt. It never got a high-def Blu-ray release. It’s not on Netflix or Max. You can usually find grainy uploads on YouTube or old physical DVDs on eBay from people who recorded it off the air in 2003.
It remains a fascinating relic.
If you want to see the literal birth of a movie star, it’s worth a look. You can see the flashes of the charisma that would eventually make Ragnar Lothbrok a legend. Fimmel didn't say much in the show—his dialogue was famously sparse—but his physical presence was undeniable.
Next Steps for the Curious Fan:
- Track down the Pilot: It’s widely considered the only part of the show that truly works. Search for "Tarzan 2003 Pilot Eric Kripke" on video archives.
- Compare the Evolution: Watch an episode of this and then watch an episode of Vikings. The difference in Fimmel's acting range is staggering, proving how much he grew once he moved past the "model-turned-actor" label.
- Read the Burroughs Original: If the "urban jungle" concept annoyed you, go back to the source material. The 2003 show took massive liberties that many purists still haven't forgiven.