Comic Con has given us so much to be excited about, but one of the things I was personally excited about the most was to see the 3 minute trailer for the upcoming AMC series Fear The Walking Dead. At first, I was interested in the prequel series which will take us back to before zombies completely inhabited the earth. However, I did have doubts just because we didn’t have any visuals on it. The series creator said it would focus on how a family would deal with the crumbling, chaos filled world around them.
After seeing the trailer, I’m confident this won’t be just another shallow prequel simply looking to capitalize on the fame of the original series. This will serve as a great companion piece to the beloved Walking Dead.
The trailer starts out with a very ordinary family just tying to get through the day. They’re a blended family so there’s apparently some drama between who’s spending time at who’s house. Overall however, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about these two families. Slowly, the virus seems to creep its way in to these families lives until they’re all completely fighting for survival. The appearance of The Walking Dead would come across as sometimes a bit too glossy. This seems to have a bit more of raw/cinematic feel.
You can tell they’re going for a more personal feel so that you feel like you’re in the middle of the chaos yourself. Some people have complained that The Walking Dead focused too much on human drama and not enough on the zombies. However, once the world ends and you know how to kill the zombies, the thing you will fear the most would be each other. The family thrown in to end of the world chaos is always a timeless plot line because we all wonder “what we would do” at a time like this.
I’m also keeping in mind that the trailer is showing clips from the entire season and not just the pilot episode. If a show doesn’t start off with a huge bang, people are apt to give up on it. However, since we got to see so much a head of time I’m sure there is a lot to stick around for.
One of the biggest things that draws me to a series is the diversity in the cast. Although we don’t seem to have a prominent African-American character yet, we have several other different cultures being represented and that’s a good enough start for me. The show isn’t completely original and it does seem to fall back on some cliches like the pain the ass teenager who never listens to anything until their they’ve thrown the whole family in to turmoil. That’s not enough to stop me from writing. It’s just enough to make me hope things don’t get too problematic. Good or bad, I can’t wait to see things for myself on August 23rd.