OK, fellow TV lovers, we've finally made it to September and the new fall season is looming, with a little less than three weeks to wait. Are you training yourselves for the ordeal?
We don't have much time. Four new series dribble in next week, with a handful of returning shows kicking off the week of Sept. 11. It's always tough to slug through the fall with so many new shows popping up at once.
I feel your pain. I, too, always worry that something worthwhile will slip through the cracks that we'll regret forever and ever the rest of our lives.
OK. That's hyperbole. In reality, only about 25 percent of new shows ever live to see a second season and there's a reason for that -- the rest stink. But every now and then there is a deserving offering that never gets, as they say in showbiz, "traction" and gets kicked to the curb before its time.
Season 2 of Fear the Walking Dead debuted April 10 with 8.8 million viewers, down substantially from the Season 1 premiere. The ratings eased downward all the way to the midseason break May 22. It was clear the series needed a makeover before returning.
If you've sampled this show expecting simply Walking Dead 2.0 and were disappointed, give it another shot. The series seems to have found new life through tweaking and fine-tuning and is worthy of revisiting.
When the series returned Aug. 21, it focused on heroin-addled loner Nick Clark (Frank Dillane), who had wandered off on his own in search of himself and the meaning of life in this post-apocalyptic world.
Nick covered himself with gore and walked among the walkers, survived a feral dog attack and an encounter with a Mexican gang, and staggered his way to Tijuana. There he met Luciana (DanayGarcia), leader of a community of survivors.
Don't forget, whereas the action of The Walking Dead has been going on for almost two years, on Fear the Walking Dead, we're just two months into the zombie apocalypse. Things are still new and the audience knows far more about this world than the characters.
Having the audience's knowledge of events so far ahead of the characters may have been part of the problem with declining ratings.
How far ahead is the audience? According to The Walking Dead Wikia, the first episode found Rick waking up in the hospital on Day 59 of the outbreak. That's just about where the Fear the Walking Dead timeline is now. The entire Walking Dead first season took place over only five days.
Here's how the other seasons broke down.
Season 2 (Hershel's farm) ran from Day 66 to Day 83 and ended with the prison looming in the background.
Season 3 (the Governor) jumps ahead to (approximately) Day 300 and lasts about three weeks. The Governor attacked the prison around Day 321 and was defeated.
Season 4 shows that time has passed and it's about Day 500. The prison has been turned into a farm. The Governor returned with a tank on Day 504, destroyed the prison and killed Hershel before being killed himself. By Day 511 our heroes had made their way to Terminus and been imprisoned in a boxcar.
Season 5 takes place between days 511 and 547 and covers the escape from the cannibals at Terminus to the arrival at the haven of Alexandria.
Season 6 begins on Day 547 of the global outbreak and ends with the nail-biting cliffhanger of Day 627. This takes us from the fall of Alexandria to Negan picking someone from the group and bashing his/her head in with his baseball bat named Lucille.
Who was executed? We'll find out when The Walking Dead returns at 8 p.m. Oct. 23. There will be weeping and wailing.
The rest of Fear the Walking Dead's 15-episode second season, which runs until Oct. 9, promises to fill in the back-stories of our main characters through flashbacks. If there was one criticism of Season 1, it was that we were asked to take too much on faith that we were going to enjoy visiting with this group on a weekly basis.
Fear the Walking Dead airs at 8 p.m. Sunday.
• Rio Games. There was good news and bad news for NBC. The TV audience over the 17 nights of the Olympics averaged 25.4 million, the lowest since 2004 and down from 31.1 million in 2012. On the other hand, NBC claimed 100 million unique digital users, a 29 percent increase over 2012. Now to sort all that out.
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Weekend on 09/01/2016