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| Kim Dickens and Cliff Curtis |
The first episode of Fear the Walking Dead was a bit short on both of its titular
attractions; there wasn’t a lot of fear and even less walking dead.
This is supposed to be a prequel to The Walking Dead which will outline what
happened to turn the bulk of the world’s population into zombies. But here’s
the thing; I don’t care. When I watched The
Walking Dead – which I did until about midway through season three – I
wasn’t much bothered about why the Walkers were there. It only mattered that
they were.
It’s a genre trope in zombie movies. The reasons
for the epidemic are seldom revealed, or if they are usually only in radios
playing in the background. What is important is that someone wakes up one
morning and discovers everyone but them has a taste for brains.
In this case the luckless person is Nick Clark
(Frank Dillane) who wakes up from a stoner party to discover everyone else dead
except his girlfriend who he discovers chewing the face off another party guest.
Nick makes his escape, runs out into the road, gets
hit by a car and ends up in hospital. Cue his mother (Kim Dickens), his
stepfather (Cliff Curtis), and assorted siblings bickering at the bottom of his
hospital bed. They are a blended family having trouble with the blending. Conveniently
Dickens and Curtis are teachers at the same high school which means they can
spend pretty much the whole episode talking about their family troubles. In
between times others comment on the increasing absenteeism because of a
mysterious ‘flu’ going around.
And that’s about it until near the end which Nick
encounters another Walker. So, one zombie show features exactly two zombies –
three if you count the one we see on a TV news clip.
One of the reasons I stopped watching The Walking Dead was that it was
essentially like watching Wagon Train
but much slower because they weren’t really going anywhere. Using that same
analogy Fear the Walking Dead is like
watching Emmerdale; it’s essentially
a soap but with nowhere near the sense of foreboding that it should have.
I don’t accept the notion of this being a slow burner;
you don’t have the luxury of a slow burn in this media landscape, you need to
grab an audience from the get-go. This show is just plain dull. In addition the
acting is dreadful; the last time I saw anything this wooden it was stirring my
porridge.
The creator of The
Walking Dead comic book Robert Kirkman has been pretty adamant that he
doesn’t want to come up with reason for the plague and I am perfectly fine with
that. We don’t need to know why there are zombies, we just need to know how
society is coping. On that basis Fear the
Walking Dead brings precisely nothing to the party. Given that the USP of The Walking Dead is wall to wall
zombies, why would anyone want to see something with fewer zombies?
It’s rather like the equally underwhelming Better Call Saul in the sense that if
the original show hadn’t contributed a halo effect then neither of these spin-offs
would have been commissioned. If you pitched the idea for Better Call Saul or Fear the
Walking Dead in isolation, you would be lucky not to feel the door handle
in the small of your back pretty smartly. These are shows which, for me, appear
only to have been commissioned because of who is pitching them and not what’s
being pitched.
Do I fear the Walking Dead? Not even remotely. Even
so, you couldn’t pay me to watch the next episode.
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