The Hot Zone

[The Hot Zone] is chock full of scientific and medical details and hardware, but they’re all made very accessible, even thrilling.

Death is nothing new on television. But the grotesque hemorrhaging Ebola induces in its unlucky sufferers brings home the gravity of the story, and the courage of its players. ... “The Hot Zone” works best as an examination of process in precisely this way — showing what it takes to defeat an outbreak, both in Jaax’s storyline and in one told in flashback, as her mentor (“Game of Thrones’s” Liam Cunningham) attempts to find an Ebola survivor and thus to use his or her antibodies for a cure.

Over its six-episode run, The Hot Zone fails to generate any meaningful gravity or more than scattered substance, but it nails a mood of mounting paranoia and the visceral impact of a solid, jump-in-the-dark horror movie. ... Come for the barf bags of blood, the monkey autopsies and lots and lots and lots of close-ups on microscope slides and pipettes; stay for the reminder that some of this stuff is real and ongoing.

Showrunners Kelly Souders and Brian Peterson, veterans of “Under the Dome” and “Smallville,” sprinkle in enough science to balance the crazier elements of “The Hot Zone,” Peak TV’s version of a summer disaster flick.

Engrossing in its specificity, if a bit too cold toward its human subjects, “The Hot Zone” gets its message across without sacrificing any drama.

Though flawed, “The Hot Zone” is an effective, real-life horror story whose key points are hard to brush aside.

With apologies to King Kong, monkey business has never been scarier than in this tense if preachy six-part docudrama. [27 May - 9 Jun 2019, p.13]

There’s enough suspense and distress here to make The Hot Zone an engaging, if not exactly fun, summer viewing experience. If it sometimes turns into a PSA, that’s forgivable. The message makes it clear such a warning is well worth issuing, so mission accomplished.

What The Hot Zone does very well is focus its story on science and procedure. It can be hard to balance drama and accuracy when one of the series’ most key lines is “the antibodies are in the plasma!” but the series makes it work.

The series gives thoughtful treatment to its depiction of safety precautions and scientific concern, yet the dialogue and drama fall disappointingly flat. The real problem exists in some murky, made-for-TV zone between nonfiction and fiction. By sticking to “The Hot Zone’s” essential tale, this version remains a story of close calls and near misses.