Survivors Reborn?

I love Survivors. Along with Goodnight Sweetheart, it's the only genre show which I might watch instead of Doctor Who. I love the starkness and brutality of Nation's vision for the post-Death future in series 1, I love the often banal but sometimes lyrical farming stories of series 2, and I even love bits of series 3, at a point when Terrance Dudley had tried his ham-fisted best to make the entire series rubbish.

So I should in theory be over-joyed the BBC are bringing it back. But now that the euphoria has worn off, I'm more than a little bit worried.

First cause for concern: the Doctor Who revival experience

Take something which I treasure for its underlying themes and tropes as much as anything else, and drop all of the elements which made it worth watching. Next, wrap it up in brainless bright lights, chuck in a Mary Sue companion and throw it onto prime time.

So I worry that where Rusty dropped the idea of the heroic Doctor as a man of science who made sense out of the nonsensical, and replaced him with an idiot savant who more often than not needs saved by Rusty's prefered heroine, the young feisty female companion, so I'm concerned that the bleakness at the heart of the first two series of Survivors will be buffed up and brightened for modern viewers, and that post-Death Britain will follow the same brain-dead pattern as American series with similar settings.

For an example try watching a few episodes of the perfectly adequate, if fairly brainless, Jeremiah, which is packed to groaning with extras from the first Mad Max film and where every town has a curiously clean and well organised market where they trade for batteries and old transistor radios.

Second cause for concern: The Writer

Survivors is a series for grown-ups, but it's been put in the hands of Adrian Hodges, the brains behind Primeval, a series primarily noted for being full of shiny effects and pretty girls inexplicably in their underwear. Admittedly basing my views entirely on that show, he really doesn't do thoughtful at all well, and I simply can't imagine him doing justice to a series about the adult (note, not teenager or young adult) reaction to an apocalypse. As with Chris Chibnall and Torchwood, adult will be confused with sex obsessed and what we'll get is lots of scenes of hard 'n' nasty nookie because there's nothing else to do after the Death, man.

Third Cause for Concern: The America Perspective

Which in part also informs my belief that New Survivors will again ape New Who and be written with one and a half eyes on the American market. I fully expect guns and explosions and lots of Survivors with great figures and a penchant for walking about in vests looking all sweaty. And if the ratings still aren't great, I predict aliens who need to mate with humans to ensure the survival of their species will land at the start of series 2.

Final Cause for Concern: Happy, Shiny People

TV execs nowadays don't really approve of bleak or downbeat. It doesn't do well in focus groups of stoned students and bored housewives, nor does it sell well to advertisers. So expect every episode to be a self-contained feast of sanitised squalor with a suitably chirpy ending in which everything Turns Out All Right. Certainly don't expect anything like 'Law and Order'.

Actually all those moans basically boil down to the same thing - after New Who I no longer trust the BBC to stay true to the spirit of any show they relaunch. Scrabbling after as broad a demographic as possible as defence in their battle to keep the license fee, combined with a deep desire to make any new series as US-friendly as they can manage, means that quality comes a distant second to saleability. Anything which is different or which could ever be seen as cause for offense to anyone must be jettisoned in favour of the innocuous but glittery.

And Survivors, in its original incarnation, is as different as can be from the BBC's current anodyne fayre.