Fear the Walking Dead

There’s a fine line between “calming” and “soporific,” but the new season mostly manages to stay on the right side of it, judging by the first three episodes.

As The Walking Dead began its second season, the characters became mired in an endless storyline at a small farm in rural Georgia, a farm where they stayed for almost the entire season. The comics had done it, so the show did too. Fear the Walking Dead tells what appears to be a similar story, but it's over within an episode. Sometimes not having anybody to copy is the best thing that can happen.

Fear the Walking Dead often feels as adrift as its characters, seeking tonal stability and a richer sense of character in the same way our crew is frantically looking for a place to call home and survivors to band together with while they’re both literally and proverbially lost at sea.

Until the writers figure out how to better serve Dickens and Curtis--who are reduced to passively reacting to things around them--there's a vacuum on Fear the Walking Dead that's undercutting its forward momentum, just as it has solved its lack of action issue with the zombies.

While the sin of familiarity could be forgiven if the series matched the exciting highs of its sister series, the series' lack of identity is only compounded by its lack of urgency. The only thing to fear is "Fear" itself. And by that, I mean boredom.

The stumbling spin-off makes a wearisome return by quickly reverting to that frustrating first-season form.

The idea of capturing the zombie apocalypse as it began, from a character-driven, family drama point of view, wasn’t a bad one, but this “Walking Dead” spin-off thus far hasn’t developed a cast to keep the premise afloat.

Fear’s second season flattens its characters, stifling much of what made them interesting in the first go-round.

Its first installments are off to a shaky start, with too much emphasis on ultimately pointless diversions and not enough on the potentially rich blend of character dynamics the series seemed well on its way to exploring by the end of last season.

With an hour that spends much of its time focusing on people chatting about what they’re doing now and what they should be doing in upcoming scenes, Fear The Walking Dead is in danger of putting Chris Hardwick out of business: This whole episode of Fear is itself like a slightly soggier version of Talking Dead.