Transformers: Prime, premiering on The Hub in 2010 as a 5 episode miniseries then airing from 2011, is a cartoon in the long-running Transformers franchise.
The centuries-long civil war between the Autobots and Decepticons has left their home planet of Cybertron an uninhabitable husk, with the remaining Cybertronians having spread out across the universe. On Earth, a small team of Autobots lead by Optimus Prime secretly live under the protection of the United States government, the Decepticons having been largely unseen since the disappearance of their leader Megatron 3 years ago. When the Decepticons make a reappearance with their leader in tow, human children Jack Darby, Miko Nakadai and Raf Esquivel get caught up in the chaos, falling under the protection of the Autobots.
With the war now resuming, the vastly outnumbered Autobots must fight to protect their new companions and the planet they live on, which - as it turns out - may have far more significance then anyone realizes...
The show's impressive CGI animation led it to be the first Transformers show since Beast Wars to win an Emmy (9 of them, to be exact), but this also gave it a hefty price tag. Thankfully, the success of the Transformers (Film Series) helped mostly alleviate this and allowed the show to run for three seasons, with the TV movie Predacons Rising finally wrapping everything up in 2013.
According to Hasbro, Prime is a part of a greater continuity called the Transformers Aligned Universe and is intended to link up with other Transformers fiction such as Transformers: War for Cybertron. Because they are being worked on by different creative organizations, the individual works are not connected by a strict continuity but are considered part of a "continuity family" (much the same way as the G1 cartoon and comics series are similar but separate entities).
Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015) is a Lighter and Softer sequel series to Prime, taking place years after the finale of Predacons Rising. The Lighter and Softerer Transformers: Rescue Bots, meanwhile, takes place concurrently, and even states the explicit time gap between Prime and Robots in Disguise: three years.
The show has been uploaded to the official Transformers YouTube channel
in its entirety.
See also: