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Series one of Survivors set up the basic premise of the show. Ninety percent of the world’s population was wiped out by a flu pandemic, leaving scattered survivors to fend for themselves without power, clean water or the people they loved.
The viewers were presented with a disparate group of people, thrown together by circumstance. The mother searching for her son, the man whose wife and kids have left him, the murderer, the doctor who watched her friends die, the rich playboy, the blonde bimbo and the teenager who became the sole survivor of his community. This is the Family we follow throughout the series.
But one of them, Abby Grant (played by Julie Graham) is special. While all the other survivors were immune, she caught the virus but recovered, a unique case. So a sinister underground laboratory is looking for her and eventually they track the Family down, kidnapping Abby and shooting Greg (Paterson Joseph) while escaping.
That was where series one ended, and where series two picked up. The Family, having lost Abby, try desperately to save Greg’s life. This they manage, but only after a burning hospital falls on Anya (Zoe Tapper) and Aalim (Phillip Rhys), causing Sarah (Robyn Addison) to have to sell herself to an unsavoury businessman to get the rescue equipment Tom (Max Beesley) needs to get them out.
This is just one of the improbable scenarios in Survivors. Later in the series Abby manages to escape the clutches of the PJS drug company who kidnapped her (walking the streets in just a hospital gown. Why didn’t she go into a house and ‘borrow’ some anonymous clothing?) while later still Tom and Greg get sold into slavery, digging coal for another slimy character.
But despite the unlikely situations, sometimes clunky dialogue and occasionally wooden performances, Survivors makes for compelling viewing. I guess we’re going through a phase of loving apocalyptic thrillers right now (The Day of the Triffids, 2012, Legion) which might explain it, because it isn’t really the acting.
Julie Graham’s Abby can move from calm reasoning to frightening intensity, sometimes seemingly at light speed. Max Beesley is typically mean and moody as Killer Tom, while Paterson Joseph has never convinced me as an actor in anything I’ve seen of his.
However, there is one acting tour-de-force in series two of Survivors, coming from the previously unlikely source of Robyn Addison as Sarah. In series one she was a peripheral member of the Family, there to look good and make mistakes. Now, from her unwilling liaison in episode one, through her guilt and anger at the man who forced himself on her, to falling in love with Aalim and her courageous quarantine and quiet death from the virus’ second strain, this young actress has shown how to give a character changing and moving performance, putting some older cast members to shame.
Survivors is flawed, but worthy. Roll on series three!
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