Survivors
The first episode of the BBCs remake of their 30 year old SF series aired last night and – for the first time in a long time – I sat down to watch it. It wasn’t a bad start to the series but nor was it a great one.
There is a tendency these days to respond to any news of a remake to ask why bother. It’s a bit of a kneejerk response to assert that anything that was worth seeing the first time around should just be screened again and to assume that anything being remade was worth seeing the first time around. While it’s true that many remakes are dire, the approach does have value if the remakers have something new to say with the existing story.
The idea of a virus wiping out most of the population is certainly still resonant and it’s a theme that has been returned to many times in TV, film, novels and elsewhere. So I’m not sure why they felt the need to spend so long setting it all up.
The first half hour of this 90 minute episode is spent introducing the characters and explaining the background. The problem is that we already know the background and, with post apocalyptic fiction such as this, it’s the characters’ actions after the event that is interesting, not the constant reminders of their otherwise normality.
That said, once Abby Grant (Julie Graham) wakes up in her nice suburban home to discover that everyone else is dead things do start to pick up quite nicely. We are introduced to the major characters – again – as they encounter each other in the remarkably tidy wasteland in which everyone drove home and parked properly before suddenly dropping dead.
The programmes did manage a few moments of real tension, but on the whole it all felt a bit too glossy. We’re told about how horrific a city full of dead bodies might be, but what we see is a small group of people driving around on completely deserted roads. But the real clanger was a remarkably silly coda that hints at a very hackneyed (sub-)plot revolving around evil government conspiracies and all the attendant stereotypes.
Although this first episode had its moments it did feel a lot more like an extended prologue than anything else. I am intending to catch episode 2 but I really do hope that things improve from here on in.
1 comment Monday 24 Nov 2008 | Paul | TV
[...] Survivors, a re-imaging of the 70’s series devised by Terry Nation, started last night on the BBC and there was a minor Twitter flurry of discussion about it. There’s been mixed reaction to the episode, including these from Jason, and from Savage Popcorn. [...]