Good, the gradual decline is handled quite well, although there appears to be a disturbing lack of people watching televisions and the national media outlets seem to be slow to pick up on the spate of shootings, considering how quickly Ferguson flooded the airways.
The kid at the school was probably the most accurate of todays interconnected society, he saw it coming and wanted to prepare. If anything he was perhaps the closest to a 'prepper' so far. Unfortunately, I suspect that we will not see him again, except perhaps as a roving corpse. Prepping is one thing, surviving is quite another.
The ignorance before the storm is a nice touch though, and something that hasn't really changed in over a hundred years. When Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, he commented on how the area around the initial landing point was completely oblivious to the fact that a hundred odd people had been burnt to death by a deadly alien weapon during the night.
The cast are...well they tick the demographic boxes, but I can see them beginning to grate a little, Lori style. I guess this will make it all the more satisfying when one of them gets shot or eaten...because let's face it, you know it'll happen.
It's an interesting choice to put a drug addict in the middle of it, that's a bit of maintenance that you've got to upkeep in making sure he goes through the withdrawal process authentically. They might just get fed up of this and get him eaten at some point.
The problem I think that this series will face is that at some point they're going to end up treading the same path as TWD. TWD opened a few weeks into the event, with a couple of flashbacks to it. At some point, FTWD is going to reach that time-zone and it'll either continue as a separate series to TWD, or stop. I guess it depends on what focus they want to make it, of the downfall of mankind, or another zombie survival genre.
Also...just one last thing. LA was sure hesitant to get in the National Guard, weren't they? I was expecting to see more Apache and Cobra gunships in the air, not to mention Chinooks and Huey evacuation teams for hospitals and the like. Maybe that'll come next episode.
Would be nice if they pulled out all the stops and gave us an LA version of
'Yonkers'.