Thanks to “Roseanne” the post-apocalyptic drama “The Walking Dead” is no longer 2018’s top TV show, but the latter series is still huge – and post-apocalyptic TV seems as hot now as vampire shows were in the wake of “Buffy” a few years ago.
Behind us are “Battlestar Galactica,” “Jeremiah,” “Jericho,” “Wayward Pines,” “The Leftovers,” “Dark Angel,” “Day One,” “Day Zero,” “Day of the Triffids,” “Revolution,” “Terra Nova,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Defiance,” “Dominion,” “Extinct,” “Survivors,” “The Last Train,” “The Lottery,” “Logan’s Run,” “The New Tomorrow,” “The Shannara Chronicles,” plenty of “Twilight Zone” episodes and now “Ash Vs Evil Dead” (which admittedly may have been a pre-apocalypse series; whatever).
But we’ve still got “Walking Dead,” “Fear The Walking Dead,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “The 100,” “Lost in Space,” “Last Man on Earth,” “The Last Ship,” “Z Nation,” “Into The Badlands,” “Adventure Time” and likely others I’m forgetting. “Westworld” may also turn out to be a post-apocalyptic tale; we’ll see what happens with that weird construction site Robert Ford decided to foster.
(Pity poor Gene Roddenberry, who was (again) a little too far ahead of the curve trying to get “Planet Earth” and “Genesis II” launched after NBC kicked him off “Star Trek.”)
So what does “The Rain” bring to the post-apocalyptic TV genre?
Great-looking Scandinavians, and lots of them.
There are also the first episode’s explosive openings minutes, which depict panicked parents literally dragging their teen daughter out of school to avoid a mysterious approaching cloud that rains down liquid so toxic it kills everything it comes into contact with.
With considerable difficulty, this Danish clan makes its way to a well-stocked rainproof shelter their scientist father somehow knows about. Amusingly, the shelter’s signage and verbal warnings are in English.
The youngest members of the family will spend six years in this shelter. The parents not so much.
When the shelter’s resources are exhausted, the teens decide to exit into a not-terribly-original brave new world in which a decimated human populace is mostly pre-occupied with finding food and keeping dry.
It’s all a bit like a Young Adult “Walking Dead,” but the deadly water looks like regular water and therefore is not as visually interesting as ravenous zombies.
The worse news is I watched the first three episodes and noticed no characters as interesting as AMC’s Carol, Tara, Andrea or Phil “The Governor” Blake.
The better news is the young actors in “The Rain” are permitted to say “fuck.” They even seem to say “fuck” in English, something I don’t recall hearing even on the TV-MA “Walking Dead” episodes (to say nothing of the standards and practices that scour the f-bomb from family-friendly CW shows like “The 100”).
The central mystery of the series could be called “Where did all this death-rain come from?” but I wonder if the series’ answer will turn out to be as interesting as the answers viewers will imagine. It might; a network of shelters suggests somebody might have known long ago the death-rain was coming.
But that’s the great thing about Netflix making available all eight episodes at once; you can always just leap ahead to the season finale. And I suspect I might do exactly that as soon as the streaming service makes that finale available.
11:59 p.m. Thursday. Netflix.
