Genre: Horror/Drama
Premise: (from writers) The residents of the small town of Grover’s Mill are trying to put their lives back together, make sense of what they had to do for survival, and remember those lost during the Week of Hell, the seven days the dead walked the earth and then, just as mysteriously, stopped. It’s the one-year anniversary and fear and uncertainty are rampant. Could it happen again?
About: You probably remember Nathan Zoebl. He wrote a script I really liked last year called “Keeping Time.” Now you may be mad that I’m bringing a ringer back on TV Pilot Week. But what can I say? I get excited when I see a writer I like and the opening to this was good. I was intrigued to see what Nathan would do with the zombie genre. Plus now he’s got a partner!
Writers: Ben Bailey and Nathan Zoebl
Details: 58 pages
I was talking to this really talented up and coming director, Tze Chu (who directed Bryan Cranston’s new movie) and I asked him about selling pilots, since he had recently sold one himself. And he told me that when he goes in to pitch pilots, the things they tend to be most interested in are the teaser (the opening scene of the pilot) and the characters. This made sense. The teaser is that thing that has the potential to hook a viewer so they watch the whole pilot, and well-crafted characters have the potential to hook a viewer to watch a whole season. So get those things in order, my friends. You do that and you’re well ahead of your competition.
So how does State of Decay fare in these categories? Let’s find out.
State of Decay’s structure is hard to get used to. We basically start in the past, one year ago to be precise, in the small town of Grover’s Mill, where a zombie outbreak terrorizes the town. We meet characters like Alex, a 20-something who gets cornered by zombies only to watch them all mysteriously die right before they’re about to kill him. Then there’s John, who’s on a fishing trip with his son, takes his eyes off him for a second only to find him being attacked by a zombie when he looks up again.
We then cut to the present, one year later, long after the zombie outbreak has died (it only lasted a week). The town’s kind of nervous, a little fidgety about the reunion, as there’s something in the back of their minds telling them that since they never found out what caused the outbreak in the first place, who’s to say it couldn’t start up a second time?
However, except for a few exceptions (like John losing his son), many of the people seem to be doing okay. It was one wild ride for a week there, but now they’ve pretty much put their lives back together.
The driving force of State of Decay’s pilot episode is rather elusive, but seems to be guided by two motors. The first is a town hall memorial ceremony for everyone to remember the men and women who fell during that terrifying week. And then there’s Brian, our narrator, who keeps us on track by describing how everything went down via both webcam and voice over.
And that’s pretty much it. We’ll occasionally jump into the past to see gruesome scenes where zombies kill town members (like when a group that’s locked themselves inside a building would rather play it safe than let a begging fellow town-member inside), but for the most part we establish there was a zombie outbreak and meet all the people who were associated with it.
So the first thing that worried me did so before I even opened State of Decay. This was a big issue I had with one of the early drafts of World War Z, which followed the book’s storyline, which had us watching the world try to get their lives back together after the zombie outbreak had been contained. My big issue with that was, “How do you make a zombie movie interesting when you don’t have any zombies?” The producers of the film eventually felt the same way, which is why they changed the setting to the ACTUAL zombie outbreak (a VERY good move in my opinion). However, I knew Nathan was a clever writer so I had confidence he’d come up with a way to circumvent this.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, that issue wasn’t addressed. We get shots of zombies killing people in the past. But nothing where the zombies are killing now. Which left us with a lot of moody, broken-down characters and not a lot of action. I feel like Nathan and Ben are trying to echo the tone of Walking Dead here. The problem with that is that Walking Dead had active zombies. You can get away with those thick dramatic melancholy moments because there could always be another zombie right around the corner to infuse tension and suspense into the episode if needed.
And that’s an important word here. Suspense. I didn’t feel it here. And I think we need to feel it when we’re dealing with this kind of subject matter. There’s no real problem, real issue, in this story. Everyone (when we’re in the present) isn’t doing much. They’re chatting with each other. They’re talking about the memorial. But there’s nothing driving the story. No goal. No problem. No mystery. No suspense. I kept waiting for something fun or unexpected to jump start the story, but it never did.
True, we did have the zombie attacks from the past to jump back to, but every zombie attack was very basic, stuff we’ve seen hundreds of times before. Turn around, there’s a zombie. A person outside being attacked by zombies. Someone wants to save him. Someone else doesn’t. We’ve SEEN that. I mean remember the scene in The Walking Dead when Rick goes into the city and is surrounded by hundreds of zombies and he goes under the tank and they’re reaching in on him and we’re wondering how the hell this guy is going to get out of this situation. That’s the kind of fun innovative never-before-seen zombie moment I was waiting for.
I maybe would’ve been able to deal with this IF the characters kicked ass. But these characters are too low-key. There’s nothing dynamic or memorable about them. John’s still sad about his family’s death. Jenny’s sleeping with Alex behind her boyfriend’s back. The gas station attendant lost his friend and co-worker. There are a lot of sad people, which keeps the tone dark and restrained. But never let tone take precedence over drama. You need interesting people who have interesting problems with other people.
There’s actually a great movie Nathan and Ben should watch if they haven’t already that has a very similar set-up to this. It’s called The Sweet Hereafter and, like State of Decay, it takes place in a small town. The difference is, instead of a zombie outbreak, it’s a school bus accident that ends up killing a lot of children. The story jumps back and forth between the past, with the town happy and optimistic, to the present, with the town beaten down and undone.
The big difference is that in the present, all the characters have carried over the baggage from the crash and turned against each other. Daughters are turning on fathers. Parents are blaming the bus driver. Families are fighting over the best way to get the most settlement money out of their children’s deaths. In other words, there’s CONFLICT! Blame is being tossed around. Everything that everyone had was changed by that bus crash and NOBODY’S relationship with anyone else in town has been the same since. I’m not getting that from State of Decay. Everyone here is too agreeable. Everyone’s patting each other on the back, saying, “Glad we beat that, right?” I wanted to see repercussions here. I wanted to see problems. Too many people here seem fine. And “fine” isn’t dramatic.
Now all of this may become moot as the season progresses. It’s hinted at that another zombie outbreak is coming. But no one’s going to get that far unless the pilot is awesome. And right now I’m sensing Nathan and Ben think they can get by on tone alone. We need cooler more original zombie kills. We need more dynamic characters with bigger secrets (Locke anyone?). We need way more conflict in the character relationships. We need more suspense. And we need something more to drive this first chapter of what will hopefully be a 100 chapter story. A memorial isn’t going to cut it.
I mean what if you add ONE mysterious character to the mix (like Robert Hawkins in Jericho) or an out-of-towner, a lawyer even (just like The Sweet Hereafter), who’s helping people settle zombie-related lawsuits. Someone who just gets in there and MIXES SHIT UP. Because nothing’s getting mixed up right now and the pilot is too restrained as a result.
While I know this review is harsh, it’s only because I know what Nathan is capable of. We’re never as good as when someone’s pushing us to be our best.
Script link: State of Decay
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t hold back too much in the pilot — TV shows are tough because there are so many surprises you plan on unveiling in future episodes. And I’m sure that’s what Nathan and Ben were saying as they read this review. “But, but, but we’re going to do all that in Episode 3 and Episode 6 and Episode 9.” I understand that. But you don’t want to hold too much back for later episodes. You need to give us some crazy shit in the pilot. Something to get us excited and make us want to come back. ESPECIALLY in a genre pilot. This needed one or two much bigger surprises. Had that happened, I probably would’ve been more accepting of the slow pace.
