Article first published as CONTAINMENT Review on Seat42F.
Beginning this week, the CW is
broadcasting a miniseries (remade from the Belgian program Cordon)
called CONTAINMENT. It tells the story of a viral outbreak in a major
city, as seen through the eyes of individuals in law enforcement and the
medical field, as well as a few who just have been unlucky in their
timing and location. Things spiral out of control as the horrific
disease spreads, and panic ensues.
While CONTAINMENT probably most closely
resembles Outbreak or its like, it will most likely be compared to The
Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead, given the popularity of zombie
programs right now, which are often caused by a virus. To make the
parallels even more clear, CONTAINMENT is set in Atlanta, Georgia, the
same place The Walking Dead begins, and goes inside a hospital. Plus,
there are riots and fences and panic in the streets, much as in the
first season of Fear the Walking Dead.
These comparisons will not do
CONTAINMENT any favors. While The Walking Dead is focused on serious
character development, the zombie outbreak really being secondary to the
story, CONTAINMENT’s plot is driven by the illness, with the characters
coming secondary. Although there are a lot of varied personalities,
none are anything new on television, and the ensemble could easily be
pulled from almost any soapy serial drama. The relationships are
needlessly complicated, and characters are artificially separated as
events unfold.
CONTAINMENT features an ensemble with no
true leading man or lady, a number of them getting roughly equal screen
time, and no high-profile actors steal focus from the others, either.
There’s Lex (David Gyasi, Interstellar), a cop who early on makes the decision to
send his best friend, Jake (Chris Wood, The Vampire Diaries), into
danger. Lex’s girlfriend, Jana (Christina Marie Moses, Odd Brodsky),
also happens to be Jake’s ex, and turns to Jake for advice when she gets
cold feet about moving in with Lex. It’s this trio, in particular, that
make the entire series feel contrived, unoriginal, and not at all
grounded in reality.
Besides that trio, Katie (Kristen
Gutoskie, Beaver Falls) is a school teacher whose class, which includes
her son, is visiting the ground zero hospital as events go down; Sabine
(Claudia Black, Farscape) is a CDC honcho brought in to manage the
situation; and Teresa (Hanna Mangan Lawrence, Spartacus: War of the
Damned) is a pregnant, unmarried young woman who plans to run away with
her boyfriend. There are also a few others, but none that I can recall
enough to name at present, and the CW’s website, lacking a cast page
most networks have, doesn’t really make it easy to look up the main
players.
In short, though, from the batch you
see, I think it’s pretty clear that CONTAINMENT is not going for
something deep and moving and realistic, but rather, pure entertainment.
Like other disaster movies and broadcast network shows before it,
CONTAINMENT is forcing situations to spark emotional reactions at
moments where there should not be. Instead of focusing on dealing with
the crisis as they need to, the main players will have their attention
split by friends and loved ones who should either be out of the way or
completely cut off from communication. It just doesn’t make for a very
high quality show, and since the archetypes are so familiar, probably a
pretty predictable one, as well. I’d call this one a skip.
CONTAINMENT premieres Tuesday at 9/8c on the CW.
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