Fear the Walking Dead: Season 1

Los Angeles, 2010. Life for Californians is going on as normal, despite growing concerns over an illness that has been spreading through the world for several months. A sudden spread in cases and growing social media reports of soldiers shooting the infected starts to cause panic. The Clark-Manawa family make preparations to flee the city, but the US military, and the infected, have other ideas.

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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THE WALKING DEAD to lose its star this year

In a surprising move, it's been confirmed that Andrew Lincoln, who plays main protagonist Rick Grimes, will depart The Walking Dead halfway through the upcoming ninth season. This comes shortly after the news that Lauren Cohen (Maggie) will drop down to a recurring character next year after she was cast in ABC's new show, Whiskey Cavalier.

The Walking Dead is of course known for its frequent shifts in cast, but Lincoln has played a major role on the show since the very first episode of the series aired in 2010. Cohen has also been a relatively major player since she joined in Season 2. The move leaves Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon and Melissa McBride as Carol Peletier as the sole two surviving regular characters from the first two seasons on the show. Reportedly AMC has offered Reedus a substantial salary hike to take over as the surviving character. Chandler Riggs, who played Rick's son Carl, was abruptly killed off in Season 8 for no immediately discernible reason, leading to a negative backlash by the fans and the actor (and his family).

Of course, it's not a given that the character of Rick Grimes will be killed off, although given the circumstances of the zombie apocalypse it's hard to see him just walking off into the sunset.

The casting changes have been a bit bemusing, as it was generally assumed that Rick would either make it through the whole show or would die at some point, handing off to either his son Carl or Maggie, who has gained impressive leadership skills over the course of the series whilst becoming a mother and losing her entire family to the zombie apocalypse.

The long-term future of The Walking Dead remains open to question, with some rumours suggesting it will end after Season 10 in 2019-20. AMC have been bullish, claiming that the show could last effectively forever with regular shake-ups in cast, but this has never been taken entirely seriously by critics. In particular, the show remains the target of multiple lawsuits from original producer Frank Darabont and comic creator Robert Kirkman. If these lawsuits are successful, AMC could potentially lose every single dollar of profit they've made on the show in eight years, which might sour their enthusiasm for it. Another possibility is that spin-off show Fear the Walking Dead, which has seen improvements its critical reception recently, might step up to take over the parent show's timeslot, possibly with a further spin-off put into development.