Can The Walking Dead spin-off capitalise on the zombie franchise's huge success? Chris Schulz checks out the first episode of Fear the Walking Dead, starring our own Cliff Curtis.
After six bleak, harrowing and occasionally boring seasons of The Walking Dead, the enduring image is that of a wild-eyed Rick Grimes dispatching yet another dead-eyed zombie with blood splattered across his beard.
Everyone who's ploughed through every episode - from season two's disastrously placid farm, to the grim prisonbase, and the especially awful Terminus - will have seen that face a thousand times by now.
Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead.
It's that of a wearied man sick of his situation, sick of his living conditions, sick of saving people and especially sick of killing zombies. He's a man who's sick to death of life.
Sometimes, watching The Walking Dead - with its cheesy dialogue, unlikeable characters and plot turns that go nowhere - can make you feel a little like that too.
If that's where you're at with the show, last night's debut of spin-off Fear The Walking Dead shows there's still hope for a little humanity to be included in the zombie genre.
As a scene-setting prequel, it certainly got your attention early with a zombie running amok in a drug den. And it ended well too, with word of a virus outbreak in Los Angeles spreading through creepy social media videos, and a stormwater tunnel showdown in which an embattled family met its first 'walker'.
Okay, so the first extended episode of six in this first season - a second season of 15 episodes has already been confirmed - was perhaps a little too light on zombie thrills and spills. It got bogged down in a hospital for too long, and spent too much time setting up what we all know is coming - zombies, and lots of them.
But some of the episode's most enjoyable moments were when they let a little light in. There were scenes of a normal, civilised society that were long ago dispatched by The Walking Dead: teens canoodling on bleachers; a sister lovingly feeding her brother jelly in a hospital bed; and Cliff Curtis' Travis Manawa teaching a sleeping student a lesson.
Alicia and Matt Sale canoodle in the bleachers. Photo/AP
They made the episode's second half, in which the zombification of Los Angeles began in earnest, all the more potent - and made you wish you were watching this on Netflix with the second episode queued up and ready to go. There is surely carnage to come.
Which brings us to Travis. Yes, that's our Cliff in full dad mode, a man being hustled by his ex-wife, bossed around by his overpowering current wife (that's an excellently headstrong Kim Dickens as Madison Clark), struggling with sleeping students and being zinged by all of his kids.
He's a man of few words. "God," is his response to watching a previously dead teenager being run over twice by a pick-up truck - and attempting to get up for more.
"What the hell is happening," asks Madison. Travis' reply? "I have no idea."
So it's evident early on that Travis Manawa is not Rick Grimes. He doesn't even have five o'clock shadow by the end of the episode. But Fear the Walking Dead's best bet would be to spend much of the next two seasons giving Curtis a Breaking Bad-style transformation - from Travis Manawa into a zombie-hating Heisenberg, if you will.
If that happens, I'm there. Curtis has the acting chops to nail that challenge. Who knows - he might even come beard-to-beard with Rick Grimes in a twisted Dead-on-Dead crossover episode. Who wouldn't want to see that?
* Fear the Walking Dead screens on Soho every Monday night, and streams on Neon and Quickflix.
* What did you think of Fear the Walking Dead? Post your comments below.
