Fear the Walking Dead, Season 1, Episode 1: Pilot
'Fear the Walking Dead' is granted a luxury it shares with virtually no other property in the industry. It can take it's sweet time getting to where it wants to go, because it already has an audience at its window. Because of this, we spend the first hour of the spin-off waiting for something to happen, only to receive no pay-off.
And the show takes advantage of that. It almost goes out of its way to tease its audience, daring us to dread before pulling back the curtain and laughing in our faces. It uses feelings we've come to know, and uses skills that 'The Walking Dead' has mastered, to promise everything we expected... eventually.
Ultimately though, it comes off as cheap. It's commendable that there is a confidence in the show that they are willing to give us an entire hour of introduction, with very little of what it promises. The intention is clear; they want to make us care about this family before they start suffering. The key word in the title is 'fear'.
It works and it doesn't. For every interesting character, there's a less interesting one. Frank Dillane plays Nicholas Clark, the troublesome child caught deep in a heroin addiction. This is delivered with wonderfully subtle acting and clever writing, mixing the madness of Nick's addiction with the descent of the functioning world (much to everybody's lack of awareness... except for that one kid with the acne).
Everything else feels very calculated though, and overtly so. The madly in-love Madison (Kim Dickens) and Travis (Cliff Curtis) keep an otherwise unorthodox family together. You have the off-the-rails son and the daughter Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) who is studious and generally the 'good child'. Madison falls into the same trap that 'The Walking Dead' did, where Lori quickly became intolerable. It's still early, but Madison hasn't shown us any redeeming traits other than her love for her family.
The show trades the grainy visuals of its companion for a fresher pallet. The cleaner, crisper visuals stand the show instantly apart from 'Walking Dead', and the few walkers we do see in the premiere are fresher, more human. They aren't scary though. Zombies don't really frighten us as an audience anymore. The show relies on the eerie, foreboding music in the background, and cinematography that hides what we'd rather see first in order to build suspense. As it attempts to stand on its own two feet, it still relies on elements established by its predecessor, not least of all its name, to draw an audience.
The show uses a school as one of its primary settings, complete with the standard 'more and more students have been calling in sick' routine. It was interesting to see social media use, and the footage of the walker is quite chilling because of how familiar that very experience is (not the walker part). Add on that zombies don't actually exist as a fictional entity in this world, and it's definitely fun to see things unfold from the beginning.
But including yet another scene we could have all expected - the banked up traffic on the highway at night, with police flying past frantically - the show can't quite get out from under the genre's web. It tries to give us something new, but it still feels old. The scene on the highway, too, jumps straight to the next morning without any explanation. The premiere wanted to show so much that it felt jumpy, despite it ironically not showing much at all.
'Fear the Walking Dead' had an audience the moment it was announced. And while it's clear that it wants to exist as its own entity, it struggles to break free. A small handful of interesting strands have been laid out, yet ultimately its success is hindered by its lack of identity as it still tries to find it. It uses fake suspense to hide its own self doubt, but for better or worse the foundation has been set, and the show can now take off.
