If You Like the Terminator... by V Scott on Doviak

Author:V Scott on Doviak [Von Doviak, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004040 PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / Reference
ISBN: 9781476821429
Publisher: Limelight
Published: 2012-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

Apocalyptic Television

Post-apocalyptic scenarios occasionally figured into episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, but for most of television history, the end of the world was not the stuff of weekly family-hour entertainment. One major exception aired from 1975 to 1977 on the BBC, which was certainly more likely to give such dark material a shot than the American television networks of the time. Survivors was conceived and written by Terry Nation, a BBC veteran best known for creating the Daleks on Doctor Who. The setup for the series is quickly dispatched in the opening-credits sequence, which depicts a Chinese scientist accidentally spilling a sample of a deadly virus, which he then spreads through his travels. As the opening episode, “The Fourth Horseman,” begins, the pandemic is spreading throughout England and presumably the rest of the world. By the end of the first hour, it appears that only a handful of survivors remain in the London area. In subsequent episodes, Nation tackles the question of what sort of society will rise in the wake of the apocalypse, with one group striving to establish a self-sufficient agrarian commune of sorts, while another attempts to impose a totalitarian law-and-order regime.

Nation departed after the first year, but the series continued for two more seasons and was remade by the BBC in 2008. Aside from the rather dire Showtime series Jeremiah, however, post-apocalyptic television didn’t really catch on as a trend until after the success of ABC’s Lost. While Lost was not itself post-apocalyptic (although many fans initially theorized it might have been), it established that many of the tropes associated with post-apocalyptic fiction—survivalism, a disparate group of characters attempting to build a new society, the group splintering into factions—could translate to an ongoing television story.

Among the first wave of Lost-influenced TV series to hit the airwaves was CBS’s Jericho, set in a fictional Kansas town of the same name. In the pilot episode, Jake Green (Skeet Ulrich) returns to his hometown of Jericho, having left five years earlier following a blow-up with his father. Shortly after his arrival, the United States is attacked with nuclear weapons, and Jericho effectively becomes cut off from the rest of the world. The first season mixed soap opera–style relationship storylines with more action-oriented survival drama, culminating in the discovery of another town of survivors, which ultimately declares war on Jericho. CBS initially canceled Jericho after the first season, citing declining ratings, but the show’s fans rallied on the Internet, persuading the network to order an abbreviated second season of seven episodes. The second season focused on a repressive provisional government taking over Jericho and transforming it into a police state. Jericho’s ratings got even worse in its return to the airwaves, and the series was canceled for good. (A “season three” of sorts does exist in comic book form.)

The most successful post-apocalyptic television series from a ratings standpoint is AMC’s The Walking Dead. Based on the comic books by Robert Kirkman and produced by Shawshank Redemption

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