The Hot Zone

Season 1 about Ebola was great.

Good actors, nice settings and a contagious disease. Exciting and scary.

I was hoping that season 2 would continue the story especially since the end of season 1 mentioned "Island of the plagues" and the idea that there was a place where multiple viruses were mixing had me intrigued.

Instead we got season 2 about Anthrax and it feels like every other episode from CSI.

Season 1 gets an 8/10.

Season 2 ... ugh, snooze.

Hot Zone: Anthrax explores aspects of the 2001 anthrax scares in ways I never heard at the time. I felt they gave away the conclusion a tad too early, and the timing feels weird (it apoears the investigation is happening weeks or months after 9/11, but in reality the investigation didn't conclude for 7 years). However, most of the acting is wonderful! A few anachronisms were distracting, like a Keurig, wall-mounted flat screen, and center-parted hairstyles were big misses for a 2001 setting, whereas Hot Zone series 1 was better about time period accuracy.

Read the book when it came out and it scared me pretty badly. The series started out well but as we got to the last few episodes everything that could go wrong did for overly dramatic effect. The situation with Ebola is scary enough without the overly contrived situation. Additionally Liam Cunningham as Wade Carter started out doing American accent but by the end of the series sounded like he just got off the ship from Ireland.

First the show is neither great nor bad, it's just another inspired by from a book story with some really good actors and some good new faces. The story though should scare everyone because it is when not if we will see Ebola outside of Africa again. The dramatization to push that point home is where the show differs from the book, facts, and the actual true story based on several articles I have read.

I've not read the book, but I have read articles checking on the story accuracy and it probably deserves a C at best for how faithful it is and an A for making sure to repeat the words that it is inspired by a true story. Some of the errors are general that things are/were simply not the way it is told, and some of the errors challenge the words inspired by because the story is changed from the actual events in fairly dramatic ways.

Having said all that, it's better than many other stories (like the Spanish Princess for example), and the acting is considerably better. Take the review with a grain of salt as 5 people rated this at 4.3 before it even aired, and as you can see for another review someone watched 5 minutes and made a decision.

If nothing else, it should scare the absolute socks off everyone because where the story deviates from fact, it shows us what it could be like old Europe with the number of dead we could have had.

I have not read the book, but I will now. Having worked in a Virology lab with someone who eventually was doing research at USAMRIID made this very personal for me. I realized right off that there were inaccuracies, starting with the man with pustulent sores on the airplane, right up to Julianna's character doing viral cultures, which would be done by a virologist, not a veterinary pathophysiologist. However, having loved the movie "Outbreak", my first comment about this to a friend was that it was like "Outbreak" turned into a series. We are truly only one airplane passenger away from such an outbreak, and if the show did nothing but make people aware of that fact, then it has served its purpose. If everyone can remember, Ebola did make it to the US, via air travel, and also was communicated to a nurse caring for a patient once hospitalized. I cannot even begin to imagine the terror of being. In a Biolevel 4 and realizing you had a tear in your suit.

Accuracy. No. Does it serve a purpose? Absolutely. Thank you, National Geographic. I wish it were lasting longer than 6 episodes.