RECENTLY VIEWED: FEAR THE WALKING DEAD

It truly took me a long time to warm up to the zombie genre. Other than a few bad Bela Lugosi zombie movies from the early 1930s, I really had to admit I was afraid of zombies. My brother in law was into AMC's The Walking Dead series, and he jokes me that I don't watch shows until they are off the air. Hey, I am finally getting into I Love Lucy! Anyways, I started watching The Walking Dead, and I got hooked. So it was natural that I would watch it's spin off series Fear The Walking Dead which debuted on August 23rd. It moves slower than its parents series but it is pretty good.

Set in Los Angeles, California, the series follows a dysfunctional family composed of high school guidance counselor Madison Clark, her English teacher boyfriend Travis Manawa, and her overachieving daughter Alicia and drug-addicted son Nick, in the onset of the zombie apocalypse. The four are forced to choose between profoundly changing or proceeding as their current flawed selves while they come to terms with the impending collapse of civilization.

What I can say from the first episode (which shouldn't be forming such negative impressions as it's only ONE EPISODE so far) is that it's definitely intriguing to see it from the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, with cool news footage sequences of what at the moment is an 'unknown virus', and people going off the rails seeing what they're trying to convince people is "people eating other people", and it's definitely great to see the reactions to the impending zombie apocalypse, as this show starts when society is still fully functioning but strange things are happening.

I also found the characters' reactions to the "incidents" that did happen to be completely relatable. The high school kid who had been following the various events online and predicted "the end of times" was written off as a conspiracy theorist and told to stop spending so much time online. Because "if there really was something to worry about, the authorities would have told us". The drug addicted guy (Nick) who witnessed it first hand dismissed it as a hallucination and either a sign of a mental disorder or a really bad 'trip'. He thought he must be crazy so he refused to talk to the police about it and instead went to his dealer to see if the drugs were laced with something. Even the people who watched the leaked shooting video online thought it must have been faked or there must be a logical reason for it (like bath salts). No one really saw this for what it is, which is exactly what I would expect if it ever happened in real life.

The debut of this series was the biggest debut in cable history, and it shows that the zombie drama is not going anywhere quick. While this series may not have me as intrigued as its parent series, I know where I will be every Sunday night at 9pm....

MY RATING: 7 OUT OF 10