I would be interested in a show that took this show’s premise and worked it out rigorously and logically. It would be fascinating to see how such a disaster might begin, spread, and affect survivors.
But what I suspect is that the makers of this show aren’t interested in doing the hard work of asking “does this make sense? is this plausible? is this how it would probably go?” They have their huge fan base; all they have to do is sketch out some seat-of-the-pants teleplays, throw in a bunch of jump scares, and be sure to include enough heads being smashed in. That’s all that they need do–so that’s all they will do.
As one little example of what I suspect to be writerly laziness: We saw a mostly-empty school bus pull up to the high school where the husband-and-wife protagonists work. All anyone seems to know is ‘the flu is going around’…there has been no official advice to avoid contact with the blood or saliva of sick people, for instance, or to restrain/confine those who die.
Apparently, according to the post quoted below, hospital staff ARE being advised to restrain the dead…but for some reason, in this world, that is ultra-efficiently-kept secret information that no one in the world of FTWD is privy to or curious about or mentioning at home or…anything. Not a tweet, not a Facebook post…nothing.
So, back to this mostly-empty school bus. Presumably, about 45 or 50 kids–those usually on the bus–have been infected.
How did that happen?
It’s LA…basically middle-class suburban, from what we can see. Houses, not high-rises. It’s unlikely that the 45 or 50 kids all live in the same building.
So maybe they were all infected at school. If that’s the case, why wasn’t everyone at the school infected? What would have targeted those 45 or 50 but not the other 5 kids who did come to school on that bus (let alone all the other people who were still present at school on the day of the scene…?)
This appears to be a very slow-moving process—get sick and then at some point, days later (it would appear), “something” happens…but it hasn’t happened yet, or why wouldn’t anyone be talking about it? Worse, a lot of people will have died in Los Angeles of natural causes on that same day (the one with the scene of the bus arriving mostly empty). Why is it only the one junkie kid who encounters that one girl in the abandoned church? It’s true that the show is depicting only what happens to that one blended family, but if other people in L.A. are having such encounters, how could that be kept secret? Wouldn’t it be all over the Internet and the broadcast news?
To name only a couple of many aspects of the L.A. area that should be causing problems in the situation of the ‘reanimates the dead’ premise: what about all the hospices in the metropolitan area? What about the staff of those hospices, who would surely have been affected? Why isn’t that in the news? What about ambulances? Why aren’t they crashing all over the city as the people picked up turn, and then attack the ambulance crews? Why isn’t that in the news?
…By contrast, an extremely well-worked-out example of a disastrous infection-event–a pandemic–devastating the USA can be seen in the 2011 movie Contagion, written by Scott Z. Burns. Mr. Burns took the time to think through the likely course such an event would take to reach epidemic proportions. That particular work of fiction was the better for the pains taken to create a plausible story.
I wish we’d see a similar level of care in the writing of this new show, because it could be truly absorbing and intriguing. But I wouldn’t bet the mortgage money on it working out that way.
