For five seasons, AMC's The Walking Dead has taken audiences on a ride from the streets of Atlanta, the Georgian backwoods and now to the nation's capitol. Along the way we have watched Rick Grimes and his rag-tag band of survivors mow down countless zombies and discover just what they themselves are made of.
Sunday night, AMC premiered Fear the Walking Dead, a spinoff series that takes us back to the beginning and across the country to a pre-apocalyptic Los Angeles just beginning to awaken to something strange going on. The pilot episode has set the record for the most watched cable series premiere in history. No doubt the ratings reflects the buzz generated by simply having Walking Dead in the title, but did the pilot episode live up to the hype? Yes and no.
The episode begins with Nick, a drug addict, waking up in an abandoned church after a night of getting high. As he searches the church for his friend Gloria, we the audience has a good idea what he will find. Sure enough, he soon comes face to face with Gloria who is hunched over a buffet of dead bodies having her fill. As Nick flees in terror, he's hit by a car and winds up in the hospital.
Next we're introduced to Nick's family: his mother Maddison, a high school guidance counselor; Maddison's boyfriend Travis, a teacher at the school; and Alicia, his snarky younger sister. They're all concerned about Nick who isn't sure if he saw what he saw or if it was the drugs. The remainder of the episode follows Nick as he escapes the hospital and seeks to drown the horrific images in his mind with more drugs and his family as they frantically search for him and uncover that he might not have been hallucinating after all.
Because I'm a positive guy, let's first talk about everything the episode did right. Centering the story around a blended, troubled family with compelling characters serves the story well. This isn't the brady bunch or even the neat nuclear pre-coma Grimes family. These characters are not only flawed, but interestingly so and the way they relate to one another is clearly the back bone of the plot so far. The cinematography was amazing. In true Walking Dead fashion, images tell more than half the story here. Sweeping shots of Los Angeles quietly bustling behind events that telegraph the beginning of the end for it all. Coupled with subtle background sounds and blink and you'll miss it references, the pilot steadily and expertly builds the suspense. Sirens heard in the distance, a staple of any big city, increase little by little throughout the episode as if to say there are things happening outside the scope of this story that spell danger.
And that leads me to what I felt the episode got wrong. I understand the slow build. I totally get that in order to have an audience invested in these characters, we must first get to know them. These concepts are not lost on me. However for the vast majority of Walking Dead fans who tuned in to see this show, they came away bored. After five seasons of zombie filled action, Fear does feel like a step backward. Is there no way to build the family story while also seeing a bit of that off-screen action we're hearing about?
Despite the relatively slow start, the remaining five episodes (that's right, only 5 more episodes this season) promise to continue building toward what we all know is coming. Hopefully we can all enjoy the slow burn a little more now that our expectations aren't so high.
What did you think of the pilot episode of Fear the Walking Dead?
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