Fear does justice to Walking Dead hit

New Zealander Cliff Curtis, pictured with Kim Dickens, plays the father figure in the spin-off.

Prequel delivers on carnage and terror as virus takes hold.

Even Game of Thrones fears The Walking Dead. The zombie drama, which follows some of the last surviving humans in an undead-ravaged America, is by most counts the highest rating cable series of all time.

It's so popular that a chat show which follows each episode, Talking Dead, is the fourth-most popular series on AMC right now, netting millions more viewers. All this despite a monumentally boring season wholly set in an isolated farmhouse.

Whether its popularity is due to its essential qualities, or the fact it simulates a post-Rapture America for the country's deeply evangelical populace, remains an open question. Regardless, the show's financial success meant it was inevitable that a spinoff series would appear at some stage.

What makes Fear the Walking Dead interesting is that it isn't - like Frasier was to Cheers, or Better Call Saul to Breaking Bad - an effort to retain some of the audience following the end of a juggernaut. Instead it's running in the off-season of the original, aiming to harvest as much blood as possible from a seemingly insatiable audience.

Apart from the series' large local fanbase, New Zealand's got an extra rooting interest in Fear the Walking Dead, which debuted Monday on SoHo, through the casting of Cliff Curtis as Travis Manawa, the latest in a long line of ethnically ambiguous somebodies to which he's directed his considerable talents.

He's the second New Zealander to take such a role this year, following Rose McIver's starring turn in Rob Thomas' brilliant, genre-wandering iZombie.

Fear is a prequel to

The Walking Dead

, documenting the zombie virus' arrival in the US. It once again opens with a key character's awakening from some kind of coma.

In the original it was Rick Grimes, the taciturn sheriff through whose eyes we met a ravaged world. Here it's Manawa's stepson Nick, blearily exiting a heroin fugue to witness a destroyed church full of blood and death.

Happily it turns out to be a neat bait-and-switch, and the first two episodes let us watch as a few isolated incidents slowly swell into a pandemic, with civilised society fraying at first slowly, then swiftly.

We love zombies partly because they're such a versatile lens through which to refract our contemporary anxieties.

Everything from consumer culture to biotech overreach has been critiqued through their staggering, relentless steps. It's too early to say where precisely Fear the Walking Dead will direct its critiques - assuming it has any - but already there are threads which might grow into worthwhile themes.

Post-Wikileaks, post-Snowden (or here, post-Dirty Politics), governments' selective distribution of information is floating in the ether.

Teenagers rely on media social rather than traditional - so no one knows whether footage of an apparently unstoppable human being shot to death is a viral video fraud or a revelatory leak.

Likewise #blacklivesmatter, Ferguson and Baltimore are in the air, as heavy-handed police attempts to contain early outbreaks create protests which devolve into riots precisely because authority seems paralysed and policy non-existent.

But wider commentary is for nerds - we watch to be entertained. Fear delivers beautifully there, with a well-balanced mix of human stories, action and horror. Because humanity remains by far the majority, and knowledge of what causes and disseminates the virus is in the realm of theory, the carnage and danger lurks and rears up unexpectedly. And no one has any idea how to respond to this new presence.

It helps that we're in a very familiar LA: broad streets, strip malls, bright blue skies.

We know this place, have seen 10,000 scenes play out on these driveways and bleachers. It's a great location for disaster to creep up and radically destabilise society.

It's also a city nearly as diverse as Auckland, so it's good to see a thoroughly plausible family at its heart. Cliff Curtis is the father figure in a blended, rather than nuclear, family, and his son is essentially estranged. The kids he actively parents are a junkie and a genius.

It trades in something closer to lived realities, rather than talkback generalities, and is both more keenly felt and affecting as a result.

The principal challenge the show faces will be avoiding devolving into a simple reboot, only with a different cast of characters and timeline. But so far Fear The Walking Dead's resisted too many easy choices and shapes as taut, smart and thrilling television.

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