By Chris Benedict

Most Monday mornings during autumn and winter I find myself up in Human Resources. No, not to discuss my attendance or job performance, and certainly not any inappropriate workplace comments, but to talk The Walking Dead with our HR director. A married mother of two little boys in her early 30s, it may not sound like she would fall comfortably into the show’s targeted demographic. Which is the unique aspect of The Walking Dead-its ability to cast an impressively wide net in terms of diverse viewership for such a genre-specific program and drag so many seemingly unlikely people in, managing to somehow please both the blood-and-guts fanatics and ordinary folks who just enjoy intense, well scripted and acted drama.

Most dullards within the film and television industry have grown shamelessly uninspired, far too content to waste our time, insult our intelligence, and empty our wallets with an endless barrage of sequels, prequels, spin-offs, remakes, reboots, re-imaginings, and foul-tasting regurgitations. As I knew may very well transpire, such appears to be the case with Fear the Walking Dead, AMC’s money-grabbing extension of their crazily popular docudrama centered around nomadic survivors of a zombie apocalypse.
The original series features relatable, empathetic characters embodied by a collective of talented actors and explores heavy existential themes the likes of who the actual monsters may really be in this horrific new world, the flesh-eating “walkers” or the increasingly feral men, women, and children who sacrifice a little more of their humanity with each unspeakable act they must carry out to live and see another hellish day.

Fear the Walking Dead, which debuted Sunday evening with a 90-minute premier episode, opened in a derelict church turned drug den in downtown Los Angeles with a junkie kid awaking from a heroin fix to find his girlfriend eating another doper’s face off. This is the beginning of the end of the world? From there, it devolves into what could pass instead for a slightly more edgy Lifetime made-for-TV movie as a family comprised of uninteresting personalities struggle through conflicts worthy of a third-rate reality series (though, really, are there any first-rate ones?)

It’s not the deficiency of recognizable stars in the new show that bothered me. As far as I am aware, only Michael Rooker and Norman Reedus enjoyed much more than marginal cult-status going in to the original series. Nor is it a want of gore that left the horror geek in me feeling empty. What plagued me was my lack of emotional investment in characters I am supposed to feel concerned about being potentially disemboweled week in and week out. As of 10:30 last night, yawning apathetically, I couldn’t have cared less. Sure, I am a glutton for punishment. But I am uncertain at this point how many more of the season’s six episodes I will make it through before writing it off for good.
After all, if I wanted to tune in to watch ethically bankrupt talking heads engaged in the discussion and participation of questionable behavior and spewing nonsensical drivel with a moral conviction that is either humorously or infuriatingly zealous or that they sometimes seem barely able to believe in themselves, well hell, I’d just flip over to Fox News.

Now, that’s scary.

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