The 21st Century Shuffle

All right, folks, I have good news and bad news for you. Well, possibly more like two sets of different news. You may recall that I said that I wasn’t going to be endlessly making comparisons between Survivors and New Survivors, mainly for sanity’s sake. I’m not quite sure how to break this to you, but that may prove a tricky resolution to stick to. You may also recall that I was pretty consistently vicious about the new show while only having seen about twenty minutes of one episode. Having watched a few properly now… well, I certainly haven’t changed my mind and decided it’s the current century’s equivalent of I, Claudius, but there’s some fairly interesting stuff going on here.

What’s most interesting to me about Episodes Two and Three of the new show (no idea why they decided not to put individual episode titles on this sucker, but they would have made it easier to keep track of things) is the way that they’re obviously based on incidents and ideas from the original show. As ever, it’s the manner in which they’ve been updated for a modern audience which is most revealing.

Episode Two opens with the group having settled into a lovely old house they have managed to acquire between episodes (there’s that trimmed-to-the-bone storytelling style again). The first order of business is to get some food, so off they trot to a local supermarket – however, they find the body of an alleged looter has been strung up inside and an armed gang claiming possession of the stores within the shop.

To seasoned Survivors watchers this is clearly a retread of parts of Gone Away, in which essentially identical events play out. Tellingly, however, the shotgun-toting yokels of 1975, who were all men of a certain age, have been replaced by a gang of lager-swilling killer chavs (although their leader still has a double-barrelled shotgun). There’s still an element of class awareness built into how the story is framed, but the conflict here is not between Abby’s libertarian views on the reconstruction and the autocratic approach of the Emergency Committee, but on a more basic level – the gang are just scum, intent on grabbing as much as possible.

Slightly disconcertingly, we then roll on into a plotline based on the stuff with Anne and Vic in the quarry, from Genesis. As New Survivors is a bit more suburban than its forebear, the quarry has become a warehouse, Anne has become Sarah (presumably because you can’t have two characters called Anya and Anne in the same show), and Vic has become Bob (I can only assume there’s some kind of half-baked Reeves and Mortimer in-joke going on here). As we are in the 21st century and there is no such thing as subtlety any more, Sarah and Bob’s relationship is much more openly manipulative, not to mention sleazy, than was the case first time around. The story plays out in much the same way: Bob breaks his leg, Greg turns up, declines to take responsibility for much, fends off Sarah’s advances (again, brick through a window subtlety is the order of the day), and poor old Bob is left to a grisly fate. The two plotlines about the warehouse and the killer chavs come together at the end, where I got a bit of an inkling of a problem with the new format – you’ve got Greg and Tom Price essentially competing to be the show’s leading man.

This continues into Episode Three, in which Greg and Tom go off looking for petrol and find themselves in a set-up sort-of-kind-of-screw-up-your-eyes-and-put-your-head-on-one-side based on the central idea of Gone to the Angels, as they encounter a family which has managed to avoid exposure to the virus and are living in desperate isolation. Basically, there’s a widowed father who’s gone a bit nuts and is doing everything he can to keep his children safe (he’s nuts, but in a sympathetic way, of course, because, hey, he loves his kids so much), even if this means keeping them as virtual prisoners.

Well, the daughter sneaks out and gets to know Tom and Greg, who are hiding in the barn to avoid the mad dad, and it’s all supposed to be quite poignant and moving, I suppose. The daughter is well-played but I found it all a bit wearing, to be honest, especially with the sadness music constantly blasting out on the soundtrack. Greg and Tom realise that, having been exposed to them (and thus the virus) she can’t go back to her mad dad and little brother. This is terribly traumatic for everyone until Tom makes a big speech persuading the mad dad that it’s better for them to take a chance and live a short but happier life out in the open rather than starve to death in misery avoiding exposure to the plague. Things conclude with the family playing happily in the sun and our heroes driving off with the petrol they needed. The logical conclusion to this story (a few days later the happy family all drop dead of the virus) does not materialise, as one of the directives for this new show was apparently to be ‘less depressing’. Is it wrong of me to prefer thought-through bleakness to sentimental cobblers?

And a few days later all their troubles were over… (Note ‘mad dad’ stare employed by Neil Dudgeon (on the left).)

Meanwhile, over in the other major plotline, Abby finds herself still bogged down in elements from Genesis, with perhaps a dash of Law and Order sprinkled on the top. She stumbles upon a supposedly self-sufficient, eco-friendly centre under the none too confident control of the last surviving member of the government, Samantha Willis (who popped up from time to time in Episode One), played by Nikki Amuka-Bird. It seems like a dream come true until the settlement is raided by a couple of desperate hopeless types, and the question rises of what to do with the offenders.

Now, the thing about Abby’s encounter with the Emergency Committee in Genesis is that it’s all about her horror and disgust at what she sees as the rise of incipient fascism and brutality, and the thing about Law and Order is that it’s about the uncomfortable truths the leaders of a community have to confront. They’re about authority, but in different ways, and you can’t do both at the same time in the way Episode Three attempts here. Abby is appalled when one of the prisoners is summarily executed, and leaves, but because Willis is not an out-and-out villain (it seems we’re not really allowed to have these in modern TV drama), there is an attempt to make her somewhat sympathetic too. This takes the form of her shooting the prisoner in the head in front of the rest of the community moments after announcing the guilty verdict, but in a clearly anxious and conflicted way. There is more than a touch of melodrama about this and clearly the groundwork for future conflict between the two groups is being laid.

And what of all the other members of the fairly sizable ensemble while all this is going on? They are worrying about building a chicken coop. Hmmm. Don’t recall that happening in Nation, but at least it makes the rest of the episode look somewhat thought-through and intellectually demanding in comparison.