Can family values defeat zombies?

it doesn’t take long to crumble all the way. It seems fairly certain that there will be zombies aplenty by the time this first arc concludes.

What’s also different about Fear the Walking Dead – which is created by Dave Erickson and Robert Kirkman (author of the Walking Dead graphic novels) — is that it’s more tightly focused on one family and whether or not they can overcome their fractured relationships and work together to survive.

Madison (Kim Dickens of HBO’s Treme and Deadwood) works as a high-school guidance counsellor; she’s recently taken her relationship with an English teacher, Travis (Cliff Curtis), to the next level – he’s moved in with Madison and her petulant daughter, Alicia ( Alycia Debnam- Carey), who is straight out of the Cable Drama Series Book of Usual Characters: she’s the disobedient teenager who, even in the middle of a zombie outbreak, simply will not comply with the easiest request, such as: “I’ll be back – don’t leave the house, it’s very dangerous out there.” (Mere seconds after her mother leaves, Alicia announces she’s going over to her boyfriend’s house. Some- where in Georgia, Carl Grimes rolls his eyes.)

Travis, meanwhile, has part-custody of his own teen, Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie). Father and son are having problems mending the emotional rifts left in the wake of Travis’s unhappy divorce from Liza (Elizabeth Rodriguez), who interprets a panicked, possibly zombie-related phone call from her ex-husband as just one more ploy to amend their custody agreement.

But the real joy in Travis and Madison’s tentative attempts to somehow form a family ( sorry, Brady Bunch lyricist) comes from Madison’s drug-addicted son, Nick ( Frank Dillane), who has just turned up in a local hospital.

Strapped to a gurney, Nick is babbling about something he witnessed in an abandoned church frequented by him and his fellow junkies; he swears he saw a woman messily devouring dead bodies. That his account is dismissed as hallucinatory raving is pretty much on par with all of the early zombie encounters that surface in Fear the Walking Dead. Save for one of Madison’s students — a smart, bullied, pimply-faced teen who begs to have his confiscated knife returned so he can prepare for the wave of undead he’s been reading about online — no one in LA seems to have the time or inclination to believe something terrible and altogether new is happening.

Instead, the zombie crisis is perceived as just further evidence of the Great American Meltdown. One of Fear the Walking Dead’s more relevant moments comes when a crowd of protesters in downtown LA reacts with horror when police officers shoot and kill what appears to be a disturbed but unarmed person. From 100 feet away this looks like another day of injustice on the news feed. From five feet away, it looks like the beginnings of a what Walking Dead considers a feed.

Separated by chaos, Madison and Travis come to the same conclusion: To survive this, we are going to have to stick together as a family (ex-wife included) and get the hell out of here. The performances are somewhat strong; whether starting a New Orleans restaurant after Hurricane Katrina in Treme or pummeling a zombified school colleague to death here, Dickens is at her plucky, deter- mined best when the odds are highly stacked against the characters she plays. What’s less clear is whether Madison or Travis or their bad children are the kind of people we want to hang out with through the arduous seasons ahead.

It may be unrealistic for the creators to build Fear the Walking Dead around a metaphorical and physical premise of family cohesion, especially if the story hinges on all of them living through every scrape that awaits. If Walking Dead has taught us anything about zombie survivalist techniques, it’s that humans have almost no control over group dynamics or twists of fate. Just when you ally yourselves and promise not to become separated – that is when your group is most likely to be split apart, perhaps permanently.

It’s difficult to believe that Madison, Travis et al can or will survive together. There’s a lot of horror in store – and if they survive, their only reward may be the existential crisis currently being experienced by Rick and the others over on The Walking Dead, in which they’ve begun to realise that the years of fighting zombies have changed them into something more fearful: dangerous, damaged humans.

In some ways, Fear the Walking Dead has the potential to become an illuminating and nuanced companion piece. It could be less like a video game (at its most reductive, Walking Dead is mainly about working forward, through increasingly difficult levels) and more like a novella, a global crisis told in microcosm and finer detail. The new series is compelling in its own way, but it will take a while to see how it congeals. Or, more aptly, if it coagulates. – Washington Post

● Fear the Walking Dead is on AMC DStv channel 140 on Mondays at 3.10pm.