Back in 2015, AMC launched the first of numerous spin-offs from it's mega-hit zombie show, The Walking Dead. Fear the Walking Dead's premise is, at first glance, not the most compelling: "what if the original show, but in California?" But it does add another tweak by showing the initial zombie outbreak as it happens. In the original show, Rick Grimes missed the outbreak itself by virtue of being in a coma, whilst this spin-off depicts the collapse as it happens.
This makes for an interesting show as the characters don't know what's going on and they don't know the rules of how the walkers work, which leads to some fairly obvious mistakes in dealing with the crisis. However, there's also a bit of a "back to basics" feel as the show can't help but retread old ground. We've already seen characters discover and are then horrified by the idea that everyone is infected by the disease and are doomed to turn whenever they die of any cause, so seeing it again can feel redundant.
Where the show has to stand or fall is with its characters and they are a mixed bag. Travis Manawa (Cliff Curtis) is well-meaning but a bit too beige and too much of a people-pleaser to make tough decisions. A reliably excellent Kim Dickens impresses more as Madison Clark, the sort of no-nonsense pragmatic series lead you need in a show like this (and probably the closest analogue of The Walking Dead's Rick). Alycia Debnam-Carey is decent as Madison's daughter Alicia, but Frank Dillane is a very weak link in the cast as Madison's son Nick, whose characterisation seems to revolve around him being a drug addict and little else, whilst Dillane's performance is insipid.
More formidable is Ruben Blades as Daniel Salazar, a shopkeeper whom the family finds refuge with who initially appears mild-mannered but turns out to be a former fighter from El Salvador who knows how to get stuff done, and the charismatic Colman Domingo as conman Victor Strand. Both characters are more morally grey and add some much-needed tonal variation to the show.
With just six episodes in this first season - like The Walking Dead before it - the show is relatively fast-moving. The initial episodes show the gradual onset of the crisis, but we quickly move to a new storyline where the family's suburb is walled off to become a safe haven. This leads to a brief interlude that feels like a riff on Octavia Butler's classic dystopian novel Parable of the Sower, with people trying to keep their old lives going in the face of all evidence that it's gone forever. The final episodes switch to a more epic, action feel as the city is overrun by walkers and our characters have to flee.
This makes the season more dynamic and fast-moving, with less time to bog down in repetitive characters beats separated by too many episodes of not much happening (a repeated criticism of the mothership show, with varying degrees of accuracy based on the season). This is good. But the show doesn't entirely make a good case for its existence. We see characters learning to deal with the walkers, we see groups forming with various people trying to take leadership of them. We see arguments about being too harsh or too gentle to deal with the situation. This is all stuff we've seen before. The fact it's happening in the bright Californian sun with Los Angeles in the background rather than the dusty backroads of Georgia doesn't necessarily make enough of a difference to justify retelling these tropes.
Still, the production values on Fear the Walking Dead's first season (***½) are higher than back on The Walking Dead in its first season, the CG is much better, allowing for some epic shots of the city falling to the undead. The character drama is serviceable, though Nick's entire storyline is tedious beyond the extreme, and the actors mostly do a solid job. There's enough here to make continuing into the second season a reasonable prospect, but the show needs to do more to differentiate itself from its forebear.
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