Fear the Walking Dead

Fear the Walking Dead is a wonderfully refreshing reboot that reminds viewers of the exciting, moving, and dramatic potential The Walking Dead had in its first season - a potential the show has all but squandered.

Even if zombies aren’t your cup of TV, there is plenty to appreciate about the construction of Fear the Walking Dead.

Fear The Walking Dead, like The Walking Dead before it, does a stupendous job of establishing an eerie tone. (Hopefully it will do a better job than its forebear at maintaining that tone without forsaking character development and inventive plots.) Early on, there are the requisite B-movie beats where camera angles, pacing, and the soundtrack combine to promise very zombie developments that, psych, don’t arrive (until they do), but the real chills come from well-chosen details.

It’s off to a very good start. Dickens and Curtis and the actors playing their kids (Dillane, Alycia Debnam-Carey, and Lorenzo James Henric) are terrific.... Fear The Walking Dead has art on its addled mind, and is all the better for it.

They also don’t know what’s happening back East, so we don’t start with any crossovers or even cross-references. There’s just the uneasy sense that something is wrong, which for TV drama purposes means something is right.

Fear the Walking Dead is heavy on spooky atmosphere and light on zombies (they’ll be known as “infected,” not walkers, we’re told) in the early going.

It's engaging, it's addicting, and it makes for damn lively Sunday night viewing.

The slow burn approach actually works nicely, assuming you can calm your appetite for immediate destruction.

The first two episodes are creepily suspenseful--they’re great examples of how effective a slow pace and a moody atmosphere can be.

Since Fear The Walking Dead isn’t featuring any pre-end-times people or places from the other show, it’s missing a sense of irony that might’ve made its early scenes more meaningful.... What makes Fear The Walking Dead so promising is that it doesn’t require any knowledge of The Walking Dead to jump in and watch.

Some viewers will be eager to get to more zombies, but the quicker the show does this, the less unique it will be. Episode two moves the plot forward faster--more characters begin to understand what “the infected” are capable of--which will appeal to those craving zombies, but is sure to disappoint anyone wanting this show to shamble its own way.

Much of this takes a by-the-numbers approach, but the cast is strong, and you get the feeling that the second episode is more indicative of where the show is heading.

You won't have to go far into the 90-minute premiere of Fear to catch sight of a dead-eyed face-chewer, but the first two episodes are more about the gradual realization that there's something going around that no one's really equipped to handle.

In Curtis and Dickens it has two of the best performers the franchise has ever featured, and it knows how to use them. Both are able to balance the sense that they're simultaneously terrified for the state of society and worried they won't be able to save their kids from becoming zombie chow.... Fear probably can't do the slow-pocalypse thing forever, but for a first season of just six episodes, it might be just about right.

Production values are strong and the entire cast is effective, although they’re not given quite enough to do in episode one. The second episode (only two were available for press) is notably better as Dickens and Curtis get in on the panic and are allowed more challenging beats as actors. I think some people will be put off by the pace of Fear.

The new series is compelling in its own way, but it will take a while to see how it congeals. Or, more aptly, if it coagulates.

Fear the Walking Dead is slow and a little bit dull.... Now the good. Fear's opening act is a strong one. There's a nice overall build, too, particularly during the second episode.

If Fear is a project with some noble intentions, it has uneven execution, with the prequel nature of it hurting as much as helping.

The best zombie stories are really about cultural anxieties, and the second episode taps into them better, with a police-brutality subplot that could lead somewhere interesting.... [But] It keeps repeating the same old tropes, expecting to give us a different kind of zombie show.

Shades of new angles to the zombie genre fleetingly emerge, but too often they're smothered by the writers' slavish devotion to their own established norms.

A serviceable but less-than-stellar spinoff of AMC’s hit series “The Walking Dead.”

Credibility aside, the slow disintegration plays out in satisfyingly tense if formulaic fashion.

Fear has some immediate strengths, as well as weaknesses that could drag down the proceedings considerably.

The 90-minute first episode and the hour-long second episode are, while not actually boring, certainly less magnetic than the original.

A second episode, fortunately, improves matters considerably, mostly in charting how the uncertainty of what’s happening begins to break down society, from civil unrest to rampant fear of the unknown. This hour points in a more promising direction, although as yet the characters still seem a little malnourished, particularly compared with the original.

There's a minimum of gore--these walkers are slow and more intact at this stage--though there are a few zombie fake-outs. But instead of building tension these sequences merely underscore the tedium.

Fear the Walking Dead is far less satisfying from a creative standpoint than Vince Gilligan's prequel offering. It's neither as original or relevant, and it certainly failed to break free of any formal restrictions. Perhaps most importantly, though, the new series lacks a beating heart.

Fear the Walking Dead probably is in no danger of becoming and out-and-out flop in its first season. But its opening episode is appreciably less gripping than the 2010 unveiling of the smash hit original.

Fear the Walking Dead takes Los Angeles, and itself, very seriously. So seriously that in the first two episodes it is sometimes difficult not to laugh. At the general cluelessness of the characters, at the intensity of the local "realism," at the heavy-handedness of the Cinematic Symbols of Foreboding (Beware the Bounce House) and the sight of so many fine actors trying to keep their feet in a promising but initially borderline-absurd narrative.

Unfortunately, the first episode is workmanlike to a fault: It sets up its characters, throwing in some forgettable, tedious character moments so we can care about them. Fear the Walking Dead doesn’t really kick into gear until Travis and Madison realize that the world has gone wrong.

Fear resorts to the dumbest of jump scares and runs in circles. You’ll get impatient for a walker to come chomping by. You might be disappointed when one does. An action sequence that caps the extended premiere is choppy and amateurishly directed.