Note: This review contains some spoilers!

This past August, Fear the Walking Dead, a TV show spinoff and prequel of the show The Walking Dead, premiered on the AMC network. The season opener begins with a young man named Nick, who awakens in an abandoned church where he discovers his friend eating a bloodied corpse. He flees into the street outside and is hit by a car and then hospitalized. His mother, Madison, and his mother’s boyfriend, Travis, chalk up Nick’s erratic behavior and story due to his heroin addictions. As the show progresses, we meet Travis’s ex-wife, Lisa, and a spanish barber, Daniel, whose families all wind up together in a gated community as conditions become worse and zombies become more apparent and numerous.

Fear the Walking Dead recycles a few details in story line from its predecessor The Walking Dead, such as with the shows’ beginnings; Nick suddenly wakes up from a heroin crash in an abandoned church, while TWD’s Rick Grimes suddenly wakes up from a coma in an abandoned hospital.

FTWD also shares TWD’s themes of rising tensions between survivors/families and rebellion against the in-control and all powerful forces behind the gated communities. What FTWD establishes differently with its storyline is the in-between stages of how humanity copes with the zombie outbreak as it progresses from its initial outbreak to its full-blown apocalyptic takeover. FTWD depicts society’s gradual breakdown as the zombie outbreak diminishes social morals, leading to riots, murders, and looting.

Although FTWD is slow-going in its beginnings as character relationships and settings are introduced, the show definitely picks up the pace of action as characters are faced with the corrupt government and military handling the outbreak and seeing the effects of the outbreak on their loved ones.

Currently, FTWD just finished its 6th and final episode of its first season. The first season averaged 11.2 million viewers and became the highest-rated first season of any series in cable history, according to variety.com. Rotten Tomatoes gives FTWD a 79% rating, indicating an overall positive reception from the show’s current viewers.

All in all, if you enjoy the original show The Walking Dead and enjoy all things zombie-related, Fear the Walking Dead is definitely a show worth checking out.