Binge-r #201: Fear the Walking Dead + Norsemen

All You Zombies: Kim Dickens (Madison) and Cliff Curtis (Travis) in Fear the Walking Dead

FEAR THE WALKING DEAD S1

Streaming Service: SBS on Demand

Availability: All six episodes now streaming, plus S2

Spin-off shows are a suspect proposition – despite Happy Days giving us Laverne & Shirley and Buffy the Vampire Slayer introducing Angel. But where The Walking Dead, the hit post-apocalyptic zombie drama that will have been on the air for a decade come October, quickly fell into a rut of bloody kills and rival cliques (yes, it’s still going), this west coast variant initially offers some nuance. Debuting in 2015 but only reaching SBS on Demand now with the first two of five seasons available, Fear the Walking Dead begins as a depiction of the days where society buckles due to an inexplicable threat. In other words, the introductory episodes are not short of relevance – or at least your worst fears – in 2020.

“If there’s a problem, we’re going to know about it,” Los Angeles high school guidance counsellor Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) reassures a worried student as news report describe an unknown virus spreading in five states. “The authorities would tell us.” The show, created by Robert Kirkman, who wrote the original The Walking Dead graphic novel, and Dave Erickson, depicts how collapse starts at the fringes, where no-one is believed. One of the first people to have an encounter with a zombie is Madison’s addict son, Nick (Frank Dillane), whose shooting gallery squat is a ground zero location. His fears are just another issue Madison and her fiancé, high school teacher Travis (Cliff Curtis), have to surmount as they try to blend their fractious families into one clan.

Knowing what’s coming isn’t an issue. The Walking Dead is a post-apocalyptic scenario, but the spin-off is very much about the collapse, looking at how the authorities militarise their response while also making use of Los Angeles’ demographics to open up the storytelling to a Latino family whose patriarch, Daniel Salazar (Ruben Blades), has a wariness borne out of long being on the receiving end of official injustice. The storytelling moves at a menacingly measured speed, with the Atticus Ross score proving to be suitable backing for the somewhat blunt horror riffs that punctuate the early episodes. The first season is just six episodes and you may want to treat it as a limited series – watching everyday life slip away as the shuffling hordes start to spread might just be a pandemic tonic.

Raiding Party: Nils Jorgen Karlstaad (Arvid) and Silje Torp (Froya) in Norsemen

NORSEMEN (Netflix, S1/S2/S3 now streaming): Because it’s impossible to see everything streaming – believe me, I’ve really tried – I’m grateful for viewing tips from subscribers. A generous hat tip to long-time reader Loadie, who alerted me to this droll Norwegian comedy about a Viking village whose 790 actions come with 2020 motivations. “It’s not really me, that fear-based leadership style stuff,” the chieftain Olav (Henrik Mestad) confides to his deputy, Arvid (Nils Jorgen Karlstad), on their way back from a raid, and the clash of circumstances makes for a deadpan farce where bloodletting and emotional self-examination are in unlikely proximity. The humour in Jon Iver Helgaker and Jonas Torgersen’s show, which is produced simultaneously in English and Norwegian, begins at the incongruous but pitches up at the sublimely witty – in the first season a Roman slave manages to get himself appointed the village’s creative director (it doesn’t end well). It’s ludicrous but endearing, and you may become invested in the fate of characters such as Froya (Silje Torp), a warrior woman really not happy at home. Put Norsemen on your half hour comedy list.

>> Great Show/New Season/New Service: Stan has acquired all three seasons – including the just-released latest one - of Search Party, an astute black comedy about 20something travails that begins with a warped detective mystery. Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development) leads the cast, in an increasingly transformative role, and the show is well worth watching if you missed it first time around [season one review here].

>> Further Reading: For The Monthly I wrote about Stan’s latest series P-Valley, a defiantly radical mix of Black experience and noir crime thriller that uses a Mississippi Delta strip club as the setting for perspectives too often left on the margins. It’s thankfully more than you expect [season one review here].

NEWLY ADDED MOVIES

New on Netflix: With a punk backbeat and Black lens, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018, 110 minutes) is a critique of America’s racial divide and cultural attitudes that uses handmade transformations and absurdist exaggeration to plot the rise of Cassius (Lakeith Stansfield), an Oakland everyman whose life changes when he masters his “white voice” – Tessa Thompson and Armie Hammer co-star.

New on Stan: John Cusack is very good as the middle-aged and trapped Brian Wilson in the Beach Boys songwriter’s biopic Love & Mercy (2014, 121 minutes), but Paul Dano excels as the younger Wilson, a blessed artist joyously pushing boundaries until his life crumbles; Emma Watson has never given a sharper performance than in in Sofia Coppola’s satire of aspirational L.A. teens who turn to robbery in The Bling Ring (2013, 91 minutes).

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