Season 2 of Fear the Walking Dead

I'm enjoying the second season of Fear the Walking Dead much more than the first. In fact I wasn't sure if there would be a second season. The primary drawback from my point of view was that the first season seemed more like a soap opera focusing primarily on teenage angst in two largely dysfunctional families as opposed to the chaos surrounding them.

Season 2 has more of an outward-looking feel, and the writers have both improved the story line and ramped up the action. They are using the technique, well-developed in The Walking Dead, of separating groups of characters to explore several adventures at once. However, the main difficulty for me in Fear the Walking Dead is that I find the characterization very weak in comparison with TWD. There are so many strong characters in TWD--Rick, Daryl, Glenn, Carol--to name a few, while the new series largely lacks interesting characters. (In fact, I find the two sons Chris and Nick mostly annoying.) In fact the character I like the most is Travis, played by Cliff Curtis, who also starred in the short-lived series Missing with Ashley Judd. Unfortunately, I'm not enamored of the main character Madison Clark, which I find to be overacted and overstated: almost a poor man's Ripley.

But then it's still early in the series and lots of ground to cover. . . .

Fear the Walking Dead

The title of The Walking Dead companion series was announced this past Friday to many boos and hisses. The title is Fear the Walking Dead, and tv.com has suggested forty-three alternate titles that would have been better. (The working title of the new show had in fact been Cobalt, as I indicated in an earlier post.)

The companion series has already been signed up for two seasons and will start airing in late summer 2015.

If you're a Walking Dead fan, you'll probably be more concerned with the quality of the scripts and acting in the new series and less with its title. I'm probably not the only one who thinks the quality of the scripts in the original series has deteriorated since the show first aired. In my opinion, the show has become so focused on "survival of the fittest" themes that the larger issues of coping with widespread devastation while maintaining a semblance of humanity and attempting to rebuild society seem to have gone by the wayside.

And speaking of survival of the fittest, am I the only one who thinks that very strong characters have been eliminated from the show while very weak characters remain? (I won't name names, but I'm sure you can single out the ones.)

All said, I'm still looking forward to the new series, mainly because it will be a chance at a fresh start.