I say prescient because of the opening credits, not the series in general. The video header to every episode shows a chinese scientist accidentally dropping a flask or something and then you see him traveling to other countries. That is, the premise is that the pandemic started by accident in a chinese lab and spread to the rest of the world. Sound familiar? I'd love to know how they thought of that but sadly the creator of the show died over 20 years ago. I don't about britain but I don't recall in the states that biological doomsday was given much consideration. Nuclear sure, political collapse sure, but biological, no.
Normally I wouldn't watch something like this let alone write a review but given the current times, I highly recommend giving it a try if you can find it. Note, it's not about a virus; not exactly. The virus sets up the story but very little of the storyline is about the technical details of the virus, and very little is about the 'death' as they refer to it when most of the population of the world suddenly dies.
So for everybody that got a D in hs biology, no, a virus can't kill off this many people in such a short amount of time. I can't explain without running afoul of the censors but it just can't happen. Anyway, even though the premise of the show is pretty ludicrous, it's very smart that they don't concentrate on it. Instead, the story lines are more around what would happen if everything about modern civilization was turned off, literally, and it's as much relevant today as it was 45 years ago. How would we survive? How well would you survive?
The stories are very original and very well thought out. You won't learn much about how to survive doomsday but every episode covers subject matter which isn't just theoretical. Sure the technical details can be far fetched at times and the drama is ruined by a pretty low brow production quality but the stories are well thought out. For instance there's a scene in season 2 when they talk about slaughtering a pig and everyone is concerned because there is no salt. In the US I think a lot of people would be confused by that and just skip over that part but it's an important point. Salt has been used for thousands of years as a preservative. Before refrigeration, our forebears all depended on things like salting meat to preseve it otherwise, the meat spoils, you get sick and die. If you don't preserve the meat then you have to eat it all at once and then it becomes a game of economy. You have X number of mouths to feed each day and some days will be feast and others will be famine. It's pretty difficult to survive when the worls is so unpredictable. That's why, until humans learned to domesticate plants and animals, the population remained pretty small for thousands of years. But anyway, it's interesting that the writers did't try to explain this point at all. The characters mention this a couple of times but they don't dumb down the story by trying to explain. But to not mention this, and to skip over this issue as if everyone were still buying meat at the supermarket would be pretty dumb too.
The series also covers more serious issues like childbirth, abortion, women's rights, political organs, and individual freedoms versus the collective. I have to admit though that season 3 went a bit too far and it was a bit too repetitive for me. Missed a couple of the latter episodes couch surfing. Still, hollywood would never make something like this. It's too smart and besides the topies in the show would be too sensitive to political correctness. The controversy wouldn't be worth the political correctness.
Again, the drama often gets lost in the poor production value but it's still worth watching. My guess is that they shot this on a small budget in the quickest amount of time they could. It's funny to watch too because in quite a few scenes, especially in season 1, the actors step over each other's lines and carry on anyway somehow. But it's not amateurish. There's still some brilliant characters and dialog and acting mixed in with the rest of the mud.
Unfortunately, they decided to remake this series in 2008. The remake copies from the original but it's not worth one second of attention. It's basically a cartoon soap opera focused on shadow conspiracies and cliche character driven plots.
It's still a cheap production, and I'd wager that for 2008, even cheaper than the original series because it's a much smaller cast (primary and extra), fewer production sets, a noticeable lack of animals, and they copied storylines from the original and everything else from all the other cartoon shows streaming out of hollywood.
Yeah, I said, a lack of animals. The remake is just a silly soap opera. The characters are living in a mansion and they're main hardship is just getting along with everyone else. There's no sense that they actually work or anything and there are hardly any animals in any of the scenes, while the original series had horses, sheep, cows, dogs, rats, and so on; lots of them. In the remake there's even this silly subplot about finding a vaccine but what good is a vaccine if everyone starves to death. You say, but there's supermarkets and warehouses full of stuff to last survivors for years. Um, no. Just like if this doomsday happened in 1975, it doesn't matter. If you want to survive doomsday you'll need to learn about subsistence survival which involves finding new energy sources, raising crops, and lots of animals. Again, I won't explain further because of the censors but everything we take for granted will disappear in a relatively short time span. Even gasoline (petrol) doesn't last but a few months before it breaks down chemically and is useless. The producers of the original series understood that but somehow in a generation and a half, this basic understanding of science and economy is either been lost or deemed less important to viewers who would prefer to watch melodrama and cartoons than think for themselves.
Normally I wouldn't watch something like this let alone write a review but given the current times, I highly recommend giving it a try if you can find it. Note, it's not about a virus; not exactly. The virus sets up the story but very little of the storyline is about the technical details of the virus, and very little is about the 'death' as they refer to it when most of the population of the world suddenly dies.
So for everybody that got a D in hs biology, no, a virus can't kill off this many people in such a short amount of time. I can't explain without running afoul of the censors but it just can't happen. Anyway, even though the premise of the show is pretty ludicrous, it's very smart that they don't concentrate on it. Instead, the story lines are more around what would happen if everything about modern civilization was turned off, literally, and it's as much relevant today as it was 45 years ago. How would we survive? How well would you survive?
The stories are very original and very well thought out. You won't learn much about how to survive doomsday but every episode covers subject matter which isn't just theoretical. Sure the technical details can be far fetched at times and the drama is ruined by a pretty low brow production quality but the stories are well thought out. For instance there's a scene in season 2 when they talk about slaughtering a pig and everyone is concerned because there is no salt. In the US I think a lot of people would be confused by that and just skip over that part but it's an important point. Salt has been used for thousands of years as a preservative. Before refrigeration, our forebears all depended on things like salting meat to preseve it otherwise, the meat spoils, you get sick and die. If you don't preserve the meat then you have to eat it all at once and then it becomes a game of economy. You have X number of mouths to feed each day and some days will be feast and others will be famine. It's pretty difficult to survive when the worls is so unpredictable. That's why, until humans learned to domesticate plants and animals, the population remained pretty small for thousands of years. But anyway, it's interesting that the writers did't try to explain this point at all. The characters mention this a couple of times but they don't dumb down the story by trying to explain. But to not mention this, and to skip over this issue as if everyone were still buying meat at the supermarket would be pretty dumb too.
The series also covers more serious issues like childbirth, abortion, women's rights, political organs, and individual freedoms versus the collective. I have to admit though that season 3 went a bit too far and it was a bit too repetitive for me. Missed a couple of the latter episodes couch surfing. Still, hollywood would never make something like this. It's too smart and besides the topies in the show would be too sensitive to political correctness. The controversy wouldn't be worth the political correctness.
Again, the drama often gets lost in the poor production value but it's still worth watching. My guess is that they shot this on a small budget in the quickest amount of time they could. It's funny to watch too because in quite a few scenes, especially in season 1, the actors step over each other's lines and carry on anyway somehow. But it's not amateurish. There's still some brilliant characters and dialog and acting mixed in with the rest of the mud.
Unfortunately, they decided to remake this series in 2008. The remake copies from the original but it's not worth one second of attention. It's basically a cartoon soap opera focused on shadow conspiracies and cliche character driven plots.
It's still a cheap production, and I'd wager that for 2008, even cheaper than the original series because it's a much smaller cast (primary and extra), fewer production sets, a noticeable lack of animals, and they copied storylines from the original and everything else from all the other cartoon shows streaming out of hollywood.
Yeah, I said, a lack of animals. The remake is just a silly soap opera. The characters are living in a mansion and they're main hardship is just getting along with everyone else. There's no sense that they actually work or anything and there are hardly any animals in any of the scenes, while the original series had horses, sheep, cows, dogs, rats, and so on; lots of them. In the remake there's even this silly subplot about finding a vaccine but what good is a vaccine if everyone starves to death. You say, but there's supermarkets and warehouses full of stuff to last survivors for years. Um, no. Just like if this doomsday happened in 1975, it doesn't matter. If you want to survive doomsday you'll need to learn about subsistence survival which involves finding new energy sources, raising crops, and lots of animals. Again, I won't explain further because of the censors but everything we take for granted will disappear in a relatively short time span. Even gasoline (petrol) doesn't last but a few months before it breaks down chemically and is useless. The producers of the original series understood that but somehow in a generation and a half, this basic understanding of science and economy is either been lost or deemed less important to viewers who would prefer to watch melodrama and cartoons than think for themselves.