‘The Hot Zone’ plays like a horror show
National Geographic Channel’s “The Hot Zone” (9 p.m. Monday-Wednesday) is both horror show and thriller. Instead of a boogeyman with a knife or gun, the killer is the Ebola virus, and its calling card for potential calamity is something as innocuous as a cough.
“The Hot Zone,” based on the nonfiction book by Richard Preston, manages to be both smart (mini lectures on infectious disease transmission via expository dialogue) and silly (a scientist spirits away dead defrosting monkey corpses in a sedan’s trunk). And yet every time someone sneezes or dares to put in a contact lens, the tension is palpable.
It’s a weird dichotomy. If one can imagine a program as fodder for “MST3K,” that’s probably not a compliment, and yet this six-hour miniseries lends itself to “Don’t do that!” mockery even as it takes viewers on a fast, entertaining ride inspired by true events.
Do not watch while eating — vomit and blood are commonly shown — and prepare for some wooden dialogue that sounds like it was written in the late ’80s when the story is largely set.
“Level Four air lock: This is where the real world meets ‘the hot zone,’” intones Dr. Nancy Jaax (Julianna Margulies, “The Good Wife”), the heroic U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who is beset upon by idiot men (who second guess her; comment on her appearance) even as she makes multiple stupid choices that flaunt protocol.
(Jaax is based on a real person and one has to wonder if to gain the real Jaax’s cooperation producers agreed to post an onscreen “thank you” at the end of the first episode that rattles off her real-life accomplishments to atone for what the fictional Jaax is shown doing on screen.)
“The Hot Zone” is stocked with a wealth of talented character actors, including Noah Emmerich (“The Americans”) as Jaax’s husband; Liam Cunningham (“Game of Thrones”) as Jaax’s mentor; Topher Grace (“That ’70s Show”) as a know-itall virologist; Robert Sean Leonard (“House”) as a midlevel commercial lab manager; and Nick Searcy (“Justified”) as the janitor who brings Jaax her dead frozen monkeys for research and is then hurt when she freaks out to receive whole bodies when she only wanted tissue samples. (“They’re fresh, ma’am!” he implores. “They just died today!”)
Yes, “The Hot Zone” will probably provoke equal amounts of hilarity and horror with its mix of surreal situations and moments of “Oh no, he didn’t!” terror.
“I hate to use a sick day for a little fever,” says a worker at the Ebola-infected monkey facility before management lets on that there may be a problem with the monkeys.
Showrunners Kelly Souders and Brian Peterson, veterans of “Under the Dome” and “Smallville,” sprinkle in enough science to balance the crazier elements of “The Hot Zone,” Peak TV’s version of a summer disaster flick.