*Spoilers Ahead*
Spin-offs are a tough thing to get right. How much of the parent show’s style should remain? What does the character being spun-off offer that can make the show different? And those are just the two I could think up on the spot! I touched a bit on spin-offs and the pitfalls of them from time-to-time in my Better Call Saul reviews but Fear the Walking Dead is different from just about any other spin-off I can think of.
A spin-off of The Walking Dead makes sense, after all the show is frequently breaking viewership records, but Fear is a spin-off in the loosest sense of the word. It includes zombies, albeit they are less prevalent, and that is essentially where the similarities end. Fear trades in the forests of the original show for the urban landscape of Los Angeles and takes place before the dead have laid waste to civilization. Those two things, I suspect, will be the things that will keep me interested in the direction of this show.
Los Angeles isn’t a particularly interesting location but the idea of examining urban decay and comparing it to the decay caused by the titular dead is an idea that I hope the show explores further. It’s part of what makes the opening few minutes of this episode the most gripping and interesting.
At first, when I heard that this show would take place before the zombie apocalypse, I was skeptical, in fact, I remained that way until I watched the episode. The most entertaining parts of the episode were when the oncoming threat of the undead slowly came into view. The video of the undead man eating a police officer and being shot, to seemingly no effect or the ending scenes where some of the crew are just starting to realize what’s going on. The problem is that those moments are few and far between in what ends up being an episode with some poor pacing.
The pilot, much like it’s parent show, was given a 90 minute time slot and the show never seems to use the extra time to it’s advantage, the plot doesn’t seem to go any farther than it would have in a regular slot and the extra time certainly isn’t used to expand on the characters.
I don’t want to seem like I’m complaining about the lack of zombies, I understand the need to keep them on the periphery and I also understand choosing to focus on the characters, as that’s what you should do in a pilot episode, introduce the audience to the people they’ll be spending hours at a time with and give them an understanding of the characters.
That last part is my main issue with the episode and it’s attempts at character building. We get introduced to the main players in this story but are given no reason to care about any of them. The characters seem like blank slates of personality who are defined solely by their history and not by any traits or anything else that would otherwise define them. Like Nick, the drug addict son of Kim Dickens’ Madison, other than being a drug addict and flunking college because of it what do we know about him? We know his girlfriend apparently overdosed and turned into a zombie. We know he’s not a fan of Madison’s boyfriend Travis. The show seems to believe this is enough to make him an interesting character but he and all the other cast feel like non-descript pieces being moved around to fit into the spots the writers want them in by episode’s end. That all might sound a bit overly-harsh but I’ve come to expect at least a solid understanding of the main character of a show by the end of it’s first episode. Here, I’m not even sure who the main character is.
Fear the Walking Dead is a show with a lot of potential to it, the direction and general atmosphere of it’s L.A. is fun but it’s lack of interesting characters might not make all the fun little touches enough to interest me.
Bits ‘n Pieces
- “I’m doing the best I can.” – A line Travis says to his son. I know dialogue has never been The Walking Dead’s strong suit but that is just the epitome of cliche and lazy.
- That was “Summer’s Almost Gone” by The Doors playing in the cafe scene. I’m proud that I didn’t have to look that up.
- I usually go pretty in depth with the plot in my reviews but I figured I’d try something a bit new this go around. Can’t guarantee it will always be like that.
Jesse Swanson is a would-be writer, podcaster and funny guy who covers TV shows of all shapes and sizes. You can find him on Twitter @JesseSwanson