Upon the mysterious return for the dead into life in a Pacific Northwest town, where people struggle against the horrible attack of the dead on their lives, the thing that challenges them.
It's not quite as atmospheric or accomplished as the original, but it's way closer than I expected it to be, anchored by strong performances throughout and an understanding of what worked about the original.
The American version of The Returned is well on its way to being every bit as good as the French original. It may even improve on certain aspects of the show, we'll have to wait and see.
It's fashionable to dismiss remakes, thanks to all the adaptations of tense, terrific foreign films that wash up on our shores missing some essential DNA, but some of them actually reveal the durability of the original source material.
Carlton Cuse and Raelle Tucker's series is cold and banal because it tries too hard to duplicate the original without capturing the essence of what made the story so compelling.
Slow and mournful, The Returned is interesting but not, in the early going, enormously compelling. Maybe that won't be true for newcomers to the story.
It's almost a shot-for-shot remake of the original, but that's not what makes this version a derivative TV zombie. It's the lack of atmosphere and the near-complete absence of a mournful, mysterious tone that makes the new version feel empty and hollow.
It needs either to be more eerie and otherworldly or to address the social and psychological consequences of its premise squarely. As is, it isn't sufficiently dead or alive.
