Fear the Walking Dead (AMC)

This premiers this coming Sunday, and I’m kinda interested in seeing if another perspective with all new characters (and taking place during the zombie uprising, rather than starting several months after it) will be fun (or feel kinda “samey”).

IGN reviewed the pilot - [URL=“http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/08/19/fear-the-walking-dead-pilot-review?utm_source=IGN%20hub%20page&utm_medium=IGN%20(front%20page)&utm_content=1&utm_campaign=Blogroll&abthid=55d4af3298cae4984e000008”]7.6

Respectable start for a new show, I thought, but I only skimmed the first part of the review (IGN seems to assume you’ve seen a show before reading the reviews, even shows that haven’t even aired yet).

Anyone else going to check this out?

For sure. I like that the focus is on the apocalypse, which Rick coma’ed through and has only been seen in occasional flashbacks on the main show. Of course, it may be terrible, but I’ll give it a fair shot.

Wow, I had no idea this was so imminent. I don’t recall seeing any ads for it… but maybe I don’t watch the right channels.

Anyway, I’ll definitely see it.

I am excited for this. Some of the best parts of Walking Dead are when the group finds a place where something obviously happened to survivors and you wonder what could have happened and how it went down. This show seems like it will scratch that itch, though I was disappointed to see it focuses on a single family, not multiple characters spread throughout the city. Still, high hopes for some good apocalyptic action come Sunday night…

Will watch for sure. I’m curious to see how well they implement the LA area into the show.

We set the DVR last night. We normally watch Hannibal Sunday nights, but he might just have to wait.

Eh. I thought it was OK. I keep wishing TWD would have at least one or two freshly turned walkers, so this will have to do. I’m not sure what the purpose of the Pulp Fiction call-out was, and I have to admit I chuckled at the “they didn’t get up and walk out” line.

The wife hated it, but I don’t think she appreciates the slow burn.

Whoa, there’s a totally new show with different characters based on The Walking Dead? Just from half-watching the trailers I did not pick up on that at all. Cool, looks like I have a second chance to get in on a zombie show on the ground floor. Plus, Kim Dickens, hell yeah!

That was pretty good. I admit a lot of my enjoyment came from the fact that I think “The Adventures of Nick the Hype” would make for a hilariously awesome show all by itself. “You were in an accident?” “I forgot to look both ways” haha.

I’ve been all around LA too so it was neat seeing the Walking Dead thing happening here. I noticed the doctor said something like “He needs to be downstairs right now!” about the old guy, so I think they already know what’s going on. That’s kind of an interesting idea if true, imagine working to stop something like that while all around you are people who are totally clueless about what’s about to go down.

edit: I didn’t have a problem with the slow burn aspect, since that’s the point of the show. It’s depicting the meltdown. So we need a bit of the normalcy in order to see it all go to hell. If it’s just a mad scramble from the start it’d be the same show that we already have.

All the talk about a flu, virus, kids not showing up for school, etc. makes no sense. Yes, everybody is infected, but according to TWD, that doesn’t mean they’re symptomatic. Nobody got physically ill from walkeritis unless being bitten or scratched first, and if that many people were, it would be that much harder to sweep under the rug.

The only thing that would work is if they establish a second, fatal pandemic along side walkeritis that kills off a large percentage of the population, leading to a sudden surge of walkers.

That was absolutely terrible. It takes an hour to introduce two unremarkable characters and their annoying kids while a stealth zombie apocalypse happens in Los Angeles? When can some of these characters start getting killed?

-Tom

Complete opposite of Tom’s view: I loved it, largely because “end of the world” movies may be my favorite genre of movies.

I can understand people wanting a faster-paced show and some better characters, but I just loved the building feeling of dread and constantly searching for signs of the outbreak - even crap like dogs barking near the church, radio snippets, etc. The 1st third of the Stand is my favorite book, in itself, for those introductory scenes, the fight for containment, the individual disaster stories and gathering together for support, moments of heroism - being able to constantly evaluate the decisions of the characters and ponder better or more creative options. Just that primal “what the hell would you do” in the situation – and I’m just delighted that we’ll get a whole season dealing with those early days of a disastrous situation.

Stuff like the Walking Dead, 28 Days Later, etc., just skip those “collapse of civilization” storylines - largely because of budget, but also in the case of Romero’s ghoul-zombies because of the narrative difficulty of plausibly having slow critters overwhelm a society (especially one with as many guns as the US!). Which is why the original Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead are still my genre favorites -they actually show the outbreak, ultimately on as large a scale as they can muster - same with the beginning of the DotD remake, or even the opening outbreak scene in World War Z, both of which had some good introductory moments but I just wanted more, much more, of that early time frame detailing society’s collapse. My favorite scene in the Dawn remake is the montage playing over Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around which shows the White House being overrun and other scenes of mass chaos (generally comprised of cleverly reused news footage of riots, etc) - now we’re going to get a whole mess of hours, longer than movies can afford to show, of that time frame.

Just loved it, and hope the burn remains nice and slow.

Nobody is actually getting sick except for people bitten, and they can take several days before they die, so all that talk is a combination of people actually getting sick from encountering ghouls and being bitten, which is starting to happen, or (more broadly) seeing someone who has been bitten and is obviously very sick and being terrified of catching something potentially contagious so they are staying home – as well as general confusion caused by something really bad actually happening and rumors spreading ---- and some of the people presumably aren’t showing up at school because they live in areas where there have already been outbreaks and they’re either dead, hiding, or on the run.

Remember - everyone is already infected and anyone who dies, from any cause, reanimates. So whereever anyone has died for any reason, there is an outbreak - so it’s already happening all over.

Well, that’s certainly what I’m hoping for. I hope this show has the budget for it. But it was a lot of nothing this week to introduce characters who sure didn’t win me over. :( I guess not everyone has kids as likable as Carl.

And does it really take several days after someone is bitten before they turn? Early on in the show, didn’t Laurie Holden’s sister turn, like, super quick? I guess Bob was around long enough to get kidnapped and eaten by cannibals. My recollection of the rules in Walking Dead is fuzzy partly because the show itself is so often fuzzy.

So Kim Dickie got bit, right?

-Tom

At this point in the story the government is still trying to keep the whole deal under wraps, and it’s obvious that the public doesn’t know what’s really going on (except for Pimply Fat Kid, who seems to know because Nerds!). My point is that if so many people have been bitten that there is talk about some world-wide epidemic and school buses are arriving with only 5 kids on it, it would be past that point and most people would have an idea, at the very least, that people are eating each other.

I thought it was awful as well. Sat through over an hour of boring TV drama for 1 minute of stock WD Zombie action.

The “scenes from this Fall” bit at the end looked a little more interesting. Hopefully it will be a better episode next time.

A lot of people didn’t care for the glacial pace of Better Call Saul, I loved it. It was a character study of someone for whom we know the fate, of what they become and how they get there.

This had a similar effect. Not the characters, some will live, some will die, most are forgettable (though I’m pulling for the ‘loser’ who brought the knife to school). I’m talking about the city itself. We know it will go to hell, but a druggie here, a homeless person there. The story for all intents and purposes will have outlived its usefulness once the ‘survivors’ escape because we already have that with Rick and company. Instead, we get to see and, I guess enjoy, seeing society break down, something often passed over in apocalypse films.

I think the goofy space-ship-guidance-counselor from Sunshine pushed the zombie away at the last second, but it certainly looked close. Could go either way but I’m assuming she was saved this time.

All we see is a family to “break down” and not much society at all and I doubt they have the budget for it either.
I also felt hardly any dread, they tried to create some but their attempts were just too shallow because so much time was wasted on just family drama (I mean how often do we have to visit that church?).
My biggest (positive) surprise so far is that the “child” (grown ups playing teenagers) characters were NOT terrible, I actually did kinda like the “boy” who was the only one I could care about. The parents however were rather mediocre especially the mother,

I liked it, but I was expecting it to be better than it turned out to be. I’m right there on the fence between Tom and Desslock.

Like Tom, I was disappointed that the entire 90 minutes focused on the two (three I supposed if you count the ex-wife) parents and three kids, with the only likeable one of the bunch being the junkie kid who somehow seems to have not only the most intelligent and witty dialog of the group but also seems to be the one quickest to figure out that something is horribly wrong despite the fact that he’s fighting the symptoms of withdraw in addition to zombies. I wish we had been introduced to more characters (and there are more coming, Rueben Blades and Mercedes Mason are cast as a father and daughter) and that they had shown a few more scenes like the one on the highway, scenes that looked somewhat normal from a distance, “oh, another accident on the turnpike”, but turn out to be far more sinister.

Like Desslock, I absolutely love stories about events leading up to and including the early stages of apocalyptic disasters. That is the promise “Fear the Walking Dead” holds for viewers. It’s not going to be a story focused primarily on killing zombies and fighting to survive, that’s what we have “The Walking Dead” for. Instead this show is going to be about the slow revelation to the main characters that something is monumentally wrong, and how they work with each other and other people to both overcome the short term obstacles of lack of information and immediate threat (like poor Calvin in this episode) and the longer term issues of the breakdown of society and the formulation of a plan for escape and survival.

Those are the things that draw me and so many others to these kind of shows. As Desslock said, it’s the “What if” scenario it presents, the thought-provoking analysis of the events as they happen and decisions made by the characters that make the whole early stages of an apocalyptic story so engrossing. How would things fall apart? What would you do? What would be the first priority? How quickly would people turn on other people? We’re going to see A LOT of that in the 5 episodes still to come this season.

Does anyone know if all 6 episodes are going to be 90 minutes? I hope so.