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“Thing is, you ain’t that thing no more. What you used to was.”

True Detective season 2 ended up being so bad that it makes me doubt whether or not the first season was actually as amazing as it was or if it was just carried on the backs of Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. That isn't to say that the only problem is the casting choices - it might be a step down from those two in a way, but Rachel McAdams is always great, Taylor Kitsch fills his role fine, and Colin Farrell pulls a good performance almost entirely out of his ass. Farrell's Velcoro is a nothing, some terrible approximation of cop character tropes that would have sunk horribly without a skilled actor there to keep it afloat, which is pretty interesting considering he is acting across from Vince Vaughn so often. I say it is interesting not because they have chemistry - they don't - but because Vince Vaughn is also given a terrible character that has to say idiotic things every ten minutes, except the difference is that his performance faceplants like a drunk gymnast. Nic Pizzolatto writes dialog like he has never heard a single human being speak.

None of this is helped by the story either. True Detective season 2 is eight episodes of television with maybe three episodes of actual plot spread between them. Plot elements that feel like they should have taken longer are rushed into an episode or two while parts that should have been developed quickly end up lasting the entire season. Nobody involved in putting this season together seems to have any concept of how pacing should work. Almost nothing of import or interest is verified or revealed until the last three episodes, and in those three episodes those reveals come entirely in clinical spurts of expository dialog. The main characters end up feeling so removed from the story - and from each other - that they sound like robots reciting Wikipedia plot synopses when this happens. When it does all come together and all the characters finally end up intersecting, it is so unfulfilling that you feel like maybe you took a wrong turn on the remote and ended up in a different show. That is almost a compliment in a way though, as the times when season 2 least resembles True Detective and everybody just shuts up - the meth lab shoot out, the penultimate episode, the sudden change of focus in the finale - it almost works. Too bad those moments, few and far between as they are, continually become weighed down under the shambling misshapen beast that is the main narrative. Somehow, and I really have a hard time wrapping my head around this, this show has figured out a way to have very little plot and also be comically overcomplicated.

All of this could have been fine with the right choices in the tone of the show, but those choices were not made. It seems like Pizzolatto has completely and utterly misjudged what it was people enjoyed about the first season, and I don't just mean that because he jettisoned 99.9% of the interesting vague occult stuff. All of the great scenes of interpersonal character development have been replaced by shots of Los Angeles freeways. He saw everybody go wild about Rust Cohle and went "hey why not have an entire cast of fatalist mumblers this time, people will love it!" No Nic, nobody loves it. You wrote the television serial equivalent of a 40 year old dude in a Tapout shirt reading Camus and sniffing a jar of his own farts. The only positive of this season is now we have yet another creator who can be added to the ever growing list of "People Who Should Never Have Complete Creative Control Over Anything." Good job buddy, you will be super happy talking narrative development with George Lucas and Vince Russo at the next meeting.

WATCH if you, for some reason, think there aren't enough overly complicated and paper thin cop dramas about people with dark pasts. DON'T WATCH if you want the first season to remain unsullied.

"Stop acting like this is normal!"

I, like most people, am a fan of the Walking Dead comic books. I, like a lot of comic book readers, believe it either should have ended already or should wrap up very soon. I, unlike apparently quite a lot of people, do not find the Walking Dead television show to be anything better than decent at best. Still, I figured despite that I would give Fear the Walking Dead a solid chance since the "society falling apart" part of the zombie apocalypse formula tends to be the most entertaining.

Right off the bat, Fear the Walking Dead greatly bungles the pacing of the show. Of the main characters, three of them are either useless or already insufferable, which is not a great start. It is only six episodes in to what will most likely be 1000 episodes of show since the general public for some inexplicable reason still devours zombie stuff with a spoon, but those six episodes have done nothing to really make me believe any of these characters have potential. Salazar is kind of great - mostly because Ruben Blades does a hell of a job. Colman Domingo's Strand is so mysterious and actually intelligent that he immediately gets rocketed up to the top of the Interesting Character List. Kim Dickens is a great actress but the wishy washy and frankly generic motivations of Madison Clark give her very little to work with. Cliff Curtis on the other hand has even less to work with through Travis, and seems to put next to no effort into it. Travis goes from "hey don't teach my kids to shoot guns during the zombie apocalypse" to "well guess I better start beating people to death" and Curtis doesn't add anything to either performance. So far, Travis Manawa is the front runner for the 2015 Arthur from Showtime's Camelot Award for most show shattering lead character. Looks like you've finally got some competition Ephraim Goodweather!

Things don't get much better as the show goes along. The human element and the social commentary aspects of zombie fiction have been almost entirely excised from the medium, so the success of zombie stuff tends to fall on how exciting or suspenseful or scary or whatever the actual zombie scenes are. Fear the Walking Dead sadly does not offer much in that regard either. After so many seasons of the main show, and countless other zombie properties ebbing and flowing through pop culture, there isn't a ton of room for Fear the Walking Dead to offer anything different. When it does try and ramp up and give you something exciting, it feels like it is on such a small scale that it doesn't even matter. How you can take the literal end of the world and make it feel like its more the end of a sound stage in Burbank I don't know.

The worst part though, beyond everything else, is that the child show inherits the most damnable trait of the parent show - every major moment hinges entirely on a character or characters being a complete moron. The military can't shoot 2000 zombies, Travis doesn't want somebody teaching his kid how to shoot a gun in the fucking zombie apocalypse, oh we should just leave the addict alone I'm sure that would be fine, i'm sure its just light reflecting off a disco ball or something kid don't worry about it and trust the military, sure guy who is part of the group that wants to kill us all I'll let you go since you seem so trustworthy, hey man stop beating on that guy who just shot one of us, hey do you think maybe somebody should guard the giant building full of shambling death monsters, etc etc etc. Nothing here feels organic at all, because the only way the writing team knows to move anything forward is by either killing somebody or making somebody more brain dead than the creatures they are fighting.

Fear the Walking Dead suffers from the exact same problems that the Walking Dead does, except without the comic book's established plot and a constant stream of strong acting performances to fall back on. This makes it a far less enjoyable watch. It still has room to grow and isn't nearly bad enough to completely give up on, but these six episodes are not a strong start.

WATCH if you only buy new Call of Duty games for zombie mode bro. DON'T WATCH if you know you won't be able to look past every character passing the idiot ball around to kill time.