Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Also for "Who" fans......

...this BBC America newcomer; from a novel by Dalek creator Terry Nation, co-starring the near-perfect Freema Agyeman. Free two-minute preview up now on iTunes.

UPDATE: A timely reminder to always read the fine print:

Some characters were emphasised in the BBC promotional material, but only appeared in the first episode as both succumbed to the disease:

Freema Agyeman as Jenny Walsh, a young primary school teacher who lived with Patricia and Anya before the virus, who died shortly after discovering the true virulence of the virus. Appeared in Episode 1.
Despite this annoying bait-and-switch scam, episode one was solid, with a nice ominous sense of scale and echoes of everything for "Day of the Triffids" to "Resident Evil." Fingers crossed.

3 comments:

Adam Thornton said...

Who'll be the first to get voted out of the virus-riddled wasteland?

Incidentally, it's an ongoing joke that Terry Nation was a hack who basically wrote the same Doctor Who scripts over and over again, and it's a hard charge to deny. Watch all his Who episodes -- and apparently many of the stories he wrote for other shows -- in a row, and you'll find the same obstacles, progressions, and characters.

All the parallels don't come immediately to mind, but the most amusing and pervasive one is relevant to "Survivor": Terry Nation almost ALWAYS included A Deadly Virus in his plots.

If the characters in Survivor face an invisible monster, or if they have to cross a gaping chasm, then more checkboxes will be filled.

Tulkinghorn said...

It premieres here on Saturday... Variety compared it to Gilligan's Island, which I think was sort of a compliment, implying that the series is basically light-hearted.

Adam Thornton said...

I've been watching the original series this weekend, and it's absolutely incredible: thought-provoking without being preachy, disturbing without being sensationalistic, and consistently interesting without being contrived.

Its tone walks a perfect line.

Though I've only just finished episode five, so I can't promise it's all this good.