The good news is, Fear the Walking Dead is going to get much better in the coming weeks. The bad news is, the pilot episode was not great, and certainly not nearly the pilot that The Walking Dead was.
Yes, it’s true that a show like this is bound to start off slow, and we should cut it some slack. There has to be world building and character building before you can pay anything off, and, had Dave Erickson and Robert Kirkman advanced us into the middle of the chaos as Los Angeles began to fall to zombies, it’d have been no different from The Walking Dead.
But you also can’t simply dismiss a weak pilot episode by saying that it was all necessary table-setting, because that’s true of most pilots, and great pilots — The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, etc. — are able to introduce characters, present the premise and hook us, and all of those shows had less than the 90-minute pilot of Fear the Walking Dead. The table-setting needs to be engaging, too.
There were two major problems with the Fear the Walking Dead pilot, and both are problems that may plague the entire first season of Fear the Walking Dead.
First, while it is important to establish characters and provide them with backstories, especially with a premise like this, it’s also important to develop interesting characters. We know that Travis (Cliff Curtis) and Madison (Kim Dickens) are in a relationship, and that they care for each other. We also know that Madison has a brilliant daughter, Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey), and a drug-addicted son, Nick (Frank Dillane). Travis also has an ex-wife, Lisa (Elizabeth Rodriguez) and a son who resents him, Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie).
Unfortunately, we only know enough about these characters so far to know that they’re not that interesting. It’s hard to get invested in a one-note book smart daughter, an obnoxious heroin-addicted teenager and the mom and step-father who spend all episode searching for him. Kim Dickens and Cliff Curtis are great actors, but there’s nothing about those characters yet that suggests they might be someone we can get invested in. First impressions are important. With The Walking Dead, we liked Rick and Morgan from the beginning. With Fear the Walking Dead, there’s no Rick. There’s no Daryl. There’s not even a first-season Carol. We can only hope that, one day, Madison or Travis grow into something more than concerned, worrying, and disappointed parents.
The second problem is that we know what’s coming. Fear the Walking Dead merely asks us to bide our time and wait for it to arrive, but there should be more than that. Intensity needs suspense, and it is lacking here. There should be some surprise. There should be some subversion along the way. We already know how zombies work, so all we have to fall back on is seeing how the characters learn and react. So far, it’s been very paint by the numbers. They’ve taken the first 20 minutes of a generic zombie film and expanded them into a 90-minute episode and still littered it with exposition dumps.
However, Fear the Walking Dead will get better. Once we get beyond the obligatory Zombie 101 introductions, there will be more room to explore and hopefully work in developments we haven’t seen yet, in either The Walking Dead or any number of zombie movies. Setting a family drama against the backdrop of an impending zombie apocalypse is a solid idea. Ultimately, the zombies will deliver. Fear the Walking Dead, however, needs to work on the “family drama” and give us someone to care enough about so that it will actually matter to us when their lives are endangered. At this moment, I wouldn’t feel much of anything if any of the major characters were killed; in fact, with heroin-addicted Nick, I’m rooting for it. As of now, the character I like the most is Tobias, despite him having only one scene.
I will grant, however, that — as promised — Fear the Walking Dead does feel different than The Walking Dead, and not just in setting and characters. The tone is different, as is the approach to the characters. However, the biggest difference is, The Walking Dead is engaging. So far, Fear the Walking Dead falls short. I’m beginning to understand why Robert Kirkman decided to begin The Walking Dead weeks into the zombie apocalypse — the first few days are kind of boring. Fortunately, there’s enough passion for this franchise that viewers will give Fear a few weeks to settle in, but it needs to pick up its game if it hopes to compete with its cousin on the East Coast.
