Earlier this week, the world was simply not ready for the announcement that Guillermo Del Toro would be collaborating with Hideo Kojima (and ahem… some dude from The Walking Dead, you might have heard of him) on a brand new installment of Silent Hill. And really, why would anyone be ready for that? Mr. Del Toro for one, seems to revel in the idea of popping up in unexpected places. Take The Strain, for example. Back in 2012, Del Toro had this to say about the project, via his Facebook page:
I have taken The Strain to Fox, I said it will be only 3 seasons even if it is successful. They heard what I said with great detail and said, we’ll be interested if you can make it a comedy… That was the last bit of comedy I ever heard, and I left.
It seems clear now, that Del Toro only said this in an attempt to way to illustrate the capricious nature of the business he’s in. As of this writing, The Strain occupies the much coveted Sunday night 9pm slot on FX, and has aired five episodes of its first season.
It depicts vampires not as the romanticized beings we’ve become accustomed to via shows like Vampire Diaries, or even True Blood, but as terrifying parasitic harbingers of a modern-day epidemic in New York City. In this version of New York, it appears to be night time about 90 percent of the time, and the vampires are not sexy.
If there were anything remotely funny about The Strain, it would be this: It really shouldn’t work as a TV show. If you’ve watched the first episode, then you know it isn’t immediately obvious what the role of each character is. While it’s clear that we should be cheering for Eph, the head of the CDC, and his college, Nora, all the other characters are left to their own devices for quite a while before the story begins to take shape in later episodes.
Against all odds, however, The Strain works. Perhaps because of its unusual journey from pilot to novel, and then to pilot again, The Strain is as a serialized as any horror on television has ever been allowed to be. There is no “monster of the week,” and there is no campy humor to distract from the fact that horrific things are happening. There is also no discernible attempt to turn the show into some sort of procedural, even if some characters appear to be designed with TV audiences in mind. (On the show’s website, Eph is described as “an empirical obsessive man who gets A’s at his job, but flunks real life.” I feel like I’ve met this guy before, somewhere.)
You could argue that The Walking Dead paved the way for this kind of show to make it on the air, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But even The Walking Dead plays to the classic TV structure, in that it could theoretically, go on forever. I for one, am compelled to keep watching, if only to witness Mr. Del Toro realize his promise of a three-season story arc. Could it be that the next frontier on the television landscape is the simple acceptance of the fact that the best stories have a clear beginning, middle and end? Only time will tell. Until then, watch out for worms, little girls, and guys with three letter names.
