First Review For Fear The Walking Dead Is Live
The first major website to review Fear The Walking Dead has done so, a good two and a half weeks before the series is actually scheduled to begin. Ken Tucker of Yahoo TV has seen the first two episodes and has posted his thoughts on both.
The review confirms what fans and critics were beginning to suspect — that the spinoff is tonally completely different from the show it spun off from.
This isn’t a blood-and-guts fright-show — at least, not in its earliest stages. I suppose there’s a potential problem here: We as an audience know something the characters in Fear do not — we know zombies are a-coming. The challenge for Fear’s makers is to hold the interest of viewers who’ll say, “Come on, come on — let’s get to the zombie killing!”
However, Tucker doesn’t feel that’s a bad thing. He gives the episodes a positive review, calling them satisfying in a different way and referring to them as “art.”
The tenor of Fear the Walking Dead is one of disquiet: Something is going on, and no one really knows what, let alone how it fully manifests itself. Indeed, if we’d never seen The Walking Dead, we’d have little idea what’s up, but that very confusion is something Fear uses as an artistic tool. The first two episodes are beautifully directed by Davidson with serene tension — quietness and confusion are the elements that help create the fear in the show’s title. Fear the Walking Dead has more in common with the supernatural series The Returned — the original French version, not the more awkward American adaptation — than with The Walking Dead.
I can already visualize the misspelled cries from Twitter the night this premieres. There are people who aren’t gonna accept this. I said it before and I’ll say it again: do NOT watch this show expecting more of the other show, or you may not enjoy it as much. If you tune into Fear The Walking Dead on August 23, and become upset that you didn’t get the zombie-slaughtering action you were expecting, know this: you were warned well in advance.