BBC Survivors – Episode One Review
(Update: click here for series one review)
For those who don’t remember the original, Survivors was a highly successful series from the 1970s. Created by Terry Nation it ran for three seasons from 1975 to 1977. This remake is written by Adrian Hodges of Primeval and follows the same basic idea.
The setup is simple: a mutated flu virus triggers Black Death style bubils, an auto-immune reaction and, for most people, death. It spreads rapidly and wipes out the vast majority of the world’s population. The few survivors of the plague slowly come together to fight the new challenges of a devastated world. And, sometimes, each other.
The story keeps the same basic structure as the original with Abby Grant (Julie Graham) searching for her son Peter as the main plot driver. That said, the very end of the first episode introduced a new element that could become very good or very, very bad.
Production quality is high, orders of magnitude above the shoestring original. Script is competent with a number of very nice set scenes, ranging from the amusing (breakfast on champagne and tinned caviar because everything else has gone off) to the harrowing (a children’s dorm room). Acting is pretty good, I particularly liked Nikki Amuka-Bird as Health Minister Samantha Willis.
There are two minor problems, both of which seem to apply to most BBC drama these days. The first is overuse of the shaky handheld camera – a great technique iff used sparingly when appropriate, not all the time. The other is intrusive background music – the original Survivors was memorable for the eerily effective absence of music.
Those niggles aside, judging by the first episode Survivors is a competent piece of drama. The question isn’t so much whether it was done well but whether it was worth doing.
Back in 1975 a serious post-apocalyptic drama on TV was something really different. Today we’ve had decades of disaster movies, Mad Max style futures and TV shows about the end of the world. The idea of civilisation collapsing and people reverting to barbarism is still frightening but no longer new. Survivors is simply a zombie movie without the zombies.
But I’ll still be watching it.
