Survivors (1975 BBC)

I first heard of Survivors when the 2008 version was playing on BBC America. It sounded like something I’d be into – post-apocalyptic survival, british, it even starred a girl from Doctor Who. I tried to watch an episode & I remember it suffering from a few things that made me never give it a chance. It had the video game cinematography, it had a ton of characters, & things that were supposed to be dirty felt clean (I think it’s really hard to get dirt right, because almost no one ever does – or maybe as actors & actresses are more & more reliant on good looks than acting skills they realize dirt has a negative impact). So I blew it off completely. Then I was reading a thing about british sci-fi & they mentioned Survivors being a TV show written by Terry Nation of Doctor Who fame that was on from 1975 – 1978. I’d had no idea that the 2008 one was a reboot, so I decided to check out the original.
Wow, this show is pretty bleak. It starts off with introducing you to plenty of characters, but you don’t really need to know their names because by the second episode most of them have died of a plague. A typical dark scene is a woman has shacks with a guy who breaks his leg & she decides to leave him to die & find another dude to help her survive in the post-apocalyptic world. & that is pretty much what this series is about, watching your own sense of right & wrong decay with the world. It starts off it’s okay to shoot someone to defend yourself & then it’s okay to shoot someone to defend your loved ones & then it’s okay to shoot someone to defend your home & then it’s okay to shoot someone to defend your food & then it’s okay to shoot someone to steal their food. It’s all very logical. It brings up & explores things about the purpose of government & leadership & whether democracy is communistic & if martialism or monarch may be superior to democracy & whether or not people are ever willing to accept personal responsibility. This show does suffer a bit from when Terry Nation leaves that the new writers don’t seem to have a guidebook (it starts out that no two people related have survived nor even any two people that have ever met each other before to there suddenly being tons of family around) & it does have a thing where they introduce a new character so you can grow attached & watch them die in a couple episodes. I think the show definitely jumps the shark when it shifts from trying to have individual bands of people survive to trying to rebuild national & global powers, but I imagine it was super influential to all the post-apocalyptic stuff I love from the ten years following it. So if you are one of those people like me that realizes when zombie movies are good they aren’t about zombies & horror & gore; but about the decay of human spirit & moral ambiguity & if survival is reason enough to stay alive, then this is worth checking out.