Hypable had the chance to see the first two episodes of Fear The Walking Dead, the new companion series which looks at the early days of the zombie apocalypse.
AMC has struggled to find a new hit series with critical and/or ratings acclaim that could match the success of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead. So, they decided to look within to find new ideas. Their first spinoff was Better Call Saul which premiered earlier this year, and their second, Fear The Walking Dead, launches on August 23.
Fear The Walking Dead opens its 90-minute premiere episode with a familiar sight to Walking Dead viewers: Someone is turning into a zombie. But luckily, the familiarity between the two shows ends there. Over the course of the premiere and the following episode, one family in Los Angeles and loved ones come to the slow but certain realization that something has gone very wrong in the world.
What makes Fear such a compelling watch is the question it addresses, which viewers of the original series have never had answered before: What happened while Rick Grimes was in a coma? How did the zombie apocalypse spread?
While the new show doesn’t reveal exactly what started the outbreak, we do see how it spread from person to person — and it’s sad to witness. Whereas the characters in The Walking Dead largely met post-outbreak, the characters and their relationships in Fear were all built pre-outbreak, so the deaths come at a higher cost. People who’ve known each other their entire lives are suddenly watching each other turn into this bizarre type of thing that they’ve never seen before. It’s heartbreaking and grounded in reality.
Reality is another reason we’re big fans of Fear. This show is set in present day, when most of the human population is still alive and well. You can imagine yourself in this scenario, watching your friends turn into these bizarre versions of humans who won’t die and are thirsty for blood.
The standout performance in the first two episodes comes from Frank Dillane, who plays Nick, the drug-addicted son of Madison (played by Kim Dickens). His unstable frame of mind blended with the uncertainty of what’s going on in Los Angeles yields one of the most interesting characters in the first two episodes. We can’t wait to see how he evolves in the series, and what his family will do to keep him in check.
Does AMC have a hit on their hands? Inevitably, yes. Coupling The Walking Dead’s built in fan base and an extremely similar name for the spinoff helps ensure the cable channel is going to have another popular show when it premieres later this month.
Whether fans have the patience for two zombie dramas over the longterm is another question. I worry that these stories may start to look and feel too similar to one another once Fear moves past the early days of the outbreak. Plus, Fear will be moving to 15 episodes for its second season (the first season is 8), so the stories may start moving a little slower like they do in The Walking Dead.
I think it’d be best if the series spent as much time in the early days of the outbreak as possible. For his part, series creator Robert Kirkman is aware of these repetition concerns and says in a letter to the media, “[the characters of Fear] will learn new things, they’ll find new tools, they’ll learn faster or slower but what we end up with is a very, VERY different show.”
I’m a big fan of The Walking Dead, but I don’t need two. I hope Robert’s promises of “new”-ness aren’t exaggerated.
With that said, I enjoy what Fear The Walking Dead is offering up so far and I’m more than happy to stick with it through the rest of the season. Watching the characters — who all love each other — suddenly have their lives uprooted is a very fascinating story to witness. And by the end of the second episode, it’s clear how the infection was able to spread so quickly while Rick Grimes slept: Family and friends turned on their own.