‘Fear the Walking Dead’: To Live and Dine in L.A.
A typical scene in Fear the Walking Dead: two cops around a Los Angeles hospital bed. Some junkie kid got hit by a car while he was running down the street screaming about the undead horrors he’d just witnessed — a drug den where a half-naked zombie girl is feasting on human flesh. One cop says, “You were raving about flesh and blood and viscera.” The dude mumbles, “I don’t know what viscera is.” Uh-oh — people eating people? This could be a bad sign. Is this just the drug-addled ravings of a zonked-out junkie? Or is our nation on the verge of a full-blown zombie apocalypse?
You’ve probably already guessed the answer, with some help from the title. Fear the Walking Dead is one of the year’s most hotly awaited TV debuts, the companion to AMC’s mind-boggling, massive Walking Dead juggernaut. If you don’t know what viscera is, you will most certainly find out. The Walking Dead, based on the Robert Kirkman comic books, is a blockbuster of flesh-chomp zombie porn that just keeps getting bigger. Meanwhile, this Kirkman-supervised prequel cleverly expands the franchise, taking us back to the early days when law-abiding citizens can only watch in terror as their friends and neighbors suddenly turn into monsters. As one character puts it, “When civilization ends, it ends fast.”
Fear the Walking Dead starts off with an ordinary dysfunctional L.A. family. The dad, Cliff Curtis, is a high school English teacher, leading a class on Jack London and the eternal battle of civilization versus nature. (His spoiler: “Nature always wins!”) His girlfriend, Kim Dickens, is the guidance counselor, with her own brood of alienated teens: Her son Nick is a heroin addict, looking very James Franco in his ratty Eighties Baracuta jacket, and her overachieving daughter, Alicia, is on her way to Berkeley. Unless, that is, something goes horribly wrong. Like maybe a mysterious flu epidemic that turns out to be something much, much worse.
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