I'll confess I was a little dubious about this project. Survivors feels to me very much a product of its time and I was unconvinced that this particular piece of lightening could be caught in the bottle twice. All in all I was quite pleased by the remake but I'm not sure I was pleased for good reasons. It was, for instance, remarkably close to the original in many places. This avoided doing anything too horrendous to the original concept but also prevented it from feeling particularly fresh. I think this is very much going to be another "cosy" catastrophe. It may have shifted its location north to Manchester and the peak district and away from the implicitly Home Counties setting of the original but in the process we seem to have lost the only clearly working class character (although since that was a comedy-tramp later revealed to be a dangerous murderer this might be considered a blessing).
( spoilers )At the end of the day I thought this was a competent remake but its, almost slavish in places, adherence to the original script will ultimately, I think, handicap it for the new audience and I doubt the lightening has been caught in the bottle a second time.
On Tuesday, interestingly, it seems we are going to be treated to an, in places, almost shot-for-shot replay of the survivors' run-in with Wormley's "provisional government". I will confess to some curiousity about how Wormley (a minor government minister in the original, IIRC) will be re-imagined. At one point I thought it might be the black female government minister who gets to be the public-face of the crisis, especially since she is showing no signs of ill-health, even at the end, but she was ultimately portrayed as too sympathetic a character to make this plausible. It also looks like we will be treated to considerably more sex than we saw in the original where the closest we get to a sex scene is Greg and Jenny chastely sharing a sleeping bag while fully clothed. Charles (the original series' main proponent of rapid repopulation) would no doubt have approved.
