This remake, in a way, just like the original series, was way ahead of its time.
With the hindsight of a post CoVid19 world, the dire warnings from shows like this seem to have been totally overlooked, discarded and scoffed at.
The original from 1975 - 77 is much better, but was out of date in places. With the popularity of zombie films at the time, it probably seemed a really good idea for the BBC to have a go at updating this classic tale of post-apocalyptic survival. Again, with hindsight, if only they had waited until after The Walking Dead, this probably would have found a more receptive and dedicated audience.
I really liked The Walking Dead at the start, but it rapidly decreased in quality, and looking back, this show was overall a much better watch.
If you know the original, it plays with some of the characters in very interesting ways, most especially Tom Price, in the original an almost cartoonishly two dimensional Welsh villain , and turns him here into a complex character always on the edge of being an anti-hero or just an outright baddie.
There is a bit more dark realism with how some of the characters cope in such a horrible scenario than there was in the original, and the Greg Preston character remains just as memorable with the excellent performance of Paterson Joseph, and they have turned it from a show with three central protagonists to a multi-strand narrative in true form.
However, the charm, pragmatism and starkness of the original is lost. Sadly they only made two series before it was unceremoniously canned.
Well worth watching both though.
