AMC's "Fear The Walking Dead" tried desperately to set itself apart from its big brother "The Walking Dead" during its first season. Though these attempts weren't always successful, the slow pace and greater emphasis on character did allow the show to stand on its own two feet while offering something different to viewers. However this approach sat better with critics than it did with casual fans, which may have led "Fear" to revert back to some its more disappointing tendencies in season two.
The first half of the show's sophomore run left a lot to be desired, with the careful focus being replaced by a lazy challenge-of-the-week format. But showrunner Dave Erickson is well aware of the frustrations his viewers share.
He knows "that has been one of the challenges of the show" and that "The Walking Dead" boasts a "huge fan base to whom we are incredibly grateful, and we obviously want to deliver a story that everybody loves. But at the same time, we wanted to make sure that our characters didn't embrace the tropes [of the genre] as readily as" most characters in a zombie movie.
In movies, the compressed time frame makes it so that "by the end of the first reel, everybody knows the score and is able to kill [the undead] without any thought," Erickson pointed out. "They become very practiced at it very quickly. And that was something we wanted to avoid. We wanted to [instead] try to balance expectations of how people should behave once they know there are zombies with this sort of attempted slow burn into the apocalypse from a character standpoint."
TV, as opposed to film, is more a long-term storytelling platform. This allows Erickson to take his time with certain developments. However, even he realizes "that creates frustrations, to a certain degree, because in some instances, you want [the characters] to get it already. And in some circumstances, the things that they do that don't seem particularly zombie-savvy, are, for me, moments where they aren't zombie-savvy.
"If you marked off the days [that have passed on air since Fear TWD debuted], I think right now, by the end of the first half [of season 2], we're getting very close to Rick waking up in Georgia," he said.
"Fear The Walking Dead" will return to AMC for the second half of season two in August.
