She’s also dealing with the rift that her sex-life is causing between herself and her honors-student daughter Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey), and between Travis and his own teenage son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie).ĭickens is the rare actor who can sell even the most hackneyed material, thanks to her ease in front of the camera her characters always seem to be taking their troubles in exactly the right stride. Deadwood/ Treme‘s Kim Dickens plays Madison Clark, Nick’s mother, who juggles her son’s addiction, her job as a high school guidance counselor, and a romance with English teacher Travis Manawa (Cliff Curtis). But thankfully, there’s a strong center for both its mild melodrama and its flesh-ripping horror. It focuses a lot, perhaps even too much, on the bland everyday drama of ordinary folks - y’know, the kind of work stresses and domestic crises that very soon aren’t going to matter, when the living are fleeing the dead.
Which is what keeps “Pilot” - and could, by extension, keep the entire prequel - from being as stellar as its original-recipe predecessor. It’s as though Nick gets granted a vision of L.A.’s terrible future, before being wrenched back into our more mundane reality - the one where distracted Angelenos rush to work and wrestle with their personal problems, blissfully unaware of the carnage around the corner. But no one was sure how far back it was going to go, which is what makes that first scene such a kick in the gut. The show’s creators - Dave Erickson and Walking Dead godhead Robert Kirkman - assume that most folks already know that this is a “prequel” to its parent show, with an entirely new set of characters experiencing the beginning of the zombie plague, before it becomes a pandemic.