Half way through the first episode and so far it's meh. Nothing special.

I really enjoyed this.

Very boring.

Solid performances though.

Totes. I wish everyone was zombies already.

I enjoyed it a lot. The characters are sympathetic enough and played well, and I dig the premise of showing the early, blow-by-blow emergence of the zombie epidemic. The next few episodes should be awesome.

Im definitely looking forward to them. But compared to the pilot of OG Dead, it's night and day. No need for the obligatory "what's happening?! Why are the dead walking?! Is it safe?!" We've seen that so often that it just feels unnecessary. Obvious Cash Grab is obvious. If the Walking Dead didn't exist already, this premiere probably would've blown my mind.

I was bored out of my mind with the show. The acting also belongs somewhere in the CW or Sci-fi network. It would have never been greenlighted by AMC if it the Walking Dead brand attached to it.

I really liked it. Very character driven. I appreciated how they kept the cast to one family instead of going HBO style of here's 15 characters all seeing zombies for the first time

The son is awful, he needs to be the first to go! And what kind of shirt is that in the opening scene? Is it a ladies?

Everything else seems like it could grow into something good.

Yes, he was wearing a girls shirt.

It was kind of boring but I liked it.

The Pros and (Major) Cons of Fear

CON: I have no knowledge of Robert Kirkman's graphic novels, however based on both The Walking Dead and Fear... I can only ascertain that he is not about creating rich, multi-layered characters. TWD's characters (namely Rick, Daryl, Carol, Abraham) work not necessarily because of the writers behind them but the actors that portray them. Honestly, if not for the actors, each and every character would be interchangeable, based on dialogue. There is so little fleshed out (aside from clunky development) that it's getting harder and harder to care about new characters introduced.

Now on Fear..., the pilot episode must rely almost entirely on these characters, because of its slower, more methodical pace. But the same problem that has plagued TWD, besides the virus, is a serious lack of ability by the writers to create interesting characters. The entire basis for the creation of a character seems to be "Name. Gender. Age. A character flaw." Slapping a character with a drug addiction doesn't make me care more about him. It makes him stand out only slightly, but that's not how to create a character. I need more to go on.

PRO: I like the idea of Kim Dickens as the main-ish character. An older woman in the lead role of a zombie apocalypse series is promising. She's the antithesis of what most horror movies boast as a lead character. Too bad the character is also deadly dull. I need more than struggle and conflict. I need to actually care. And I just about don't.

PRO: Once things heated up, Fear... looked really promising. The ending with running over the walker was intense and felt straight out of a classic zombie flick. For the first time in the whole episode, it felt separate from TWD. So far, the only difference had been the same boring soap opera dialogue and situations were without the zombie apocalypse in the background, at least not in its most dire of days.

CON: The setup. If Fear... lasts, and by all accounts it will at least go two seasons and beyond if ratings stay decent, where does it go besides the same well-trodden path? Thus far, we're following one family and a bunch of peripheral characters. Eventually, it'll just be The Walking Dead: Los Angeles.

Now, if I had been in charge of this, I would have made Fear... a True Detective-style spinoff. Each season would consist of a new set of characters in a new setting and it would be entirely self-contained. Maybe the characters survive, maybe they don't. But each year we would join a new story within the same universe. I actually for a while thought this would be how Fear... would operate (as a miniseries) until it got that second season order.

Overall, the pilot wasn't awful. There were glimmers of brilliance buried in the sludge. And I don't hate any of the characters. I just wish they were more creatively-drawn rather than the same old cookie-cutter types.

Check out the main cast list on Wiki, which I assume are official character bios:



Over-achiever. No-nonsense. Hardworking. Loyal. Protect the family AT ANY COST. It all sounds so cheap and redundant. And easily mock-worthy.

Really good second episode - I'm in on this show

I'm loving it so far but that's probably because I'm a big fan of the Walking Dead tv series so this is just an extension of it. It's a different perspective on what happened as we get to see a glimpse of how it began. I want to see where the President Trump was in all of this. How is the government going to collapse or has it. I'm thinking they should have put these people in Washington DC since that's where the other group was headed.

In this incarnation, we can see how things got out of control in the beginning because no one knew what this was. You got healthcare workers getting in close contact with non dead people and people trying to help folks they know that are sick without knowing the full consequence of it but at some point they figured out what was what. How much farther in the future is the period of the Walking Dead taking place compared to this. As long as we don't actually get stuck in that freaking desert they are talking about I think I'll be good.

Episode 2 was possibly more nerve-wracking than any of TWD's 67 episodes. There was a sense of dread and anxiousness that I've never felt watching the original. It's incredible the difference between a character-driven drama that TWD has become and the horror-driven thriller FWTD is shaping into after just two weeks.

I love the parallels between fiction and reality (the cop stocking up on water, mirroring California's real-life water shortage; the riots over shooting an unarmed person multiple times).

The show still has some worrisome flaws, but I'm digging it a lot. I just have no clue where it goes from here. Keeping things personal and intimate (with most lead characters related somehow) is smart. However if the show lasts, they'll just stock the cast, pretty much ruining a good thing.

The shot of the entire city going dark was one of the most chilling things I've seen on either show.

The first three episodes are definitely stronger than I thought they would ever be. But looking ahead to next week, I hope it doesn't deflate as we add even more characters.

I'm still interested in how this started. Where it began. What is it. Why did that black out occur. What the time difference is between this and the time Rick wakes up in that hospital room.

Based on what I saw this lady episode it appeared the government is handling things quarantine style. I'm still curious as to how things just went totally south. I'm also curious about the Hispanic guys wife. If she does is she going to turn. That hasn't presented itself yet. I'm not liking either male child after this episode. One is still doing drugs and the other is a do gooder which will only endanger people. The wife leaving the quarantine zone was over the top. Why is she doing this and who in their right mind would do it. Lastly the father is just becoming to optimistic and positive thigh he is presenting that side of thinking. We know he's just clueless as to where things are headed but it's a bit annoying how he's acting.

I wish this series waited a few more episodes before embracing such a traditional "Dead" story and structure (heroes uneasily existing in a confined town alongside a sinister authority figure) versus showing the emerging zombie crisis in a minute-by-minute, incident-by-incident, ultra-immediate way.

I agree with you David. It should be exploring the why and how this occurred and taking things on a slow burn pace. We don't need to be fast forwarding so quickly in the future.

Ugh. This Daniel Salazar character has just become a repulsive character. Who can root for this character now. Also a side of me thinks this interpretation is an unnecessary negative picture of Hispanics. I'm not one to care about ethnic portrayals on film but it just feels so out of place.

Well well well. Now we learn this did happen immediately after the first incident (people rising from normal death). We also learn that they know exactly how to kill them though they may have figured that out earlier anyway. I don't understand why the military would leave gobs of undead in a station or why they want to eliminate civilians in safe zones.

A smashing finale, I thought. Very exciting and even a bit moving. A few of the mid-season episodes left me a tad colder than the start and the finish, but, in general, I am definitely a fan of this series. It is stylish and well-assembled, and it has distinguished itself from its parent. I am eager to see the evolution of the characters, particularly Strand and Nick.