If “Walking Dead” weren’t alive, up and taking a vacation to generate new blood, Steven Spielberg’s “Falling Skies” would be the best current sci-fi series on TV.
Unfortunately, “Walking Dead” happened first and grabbed a lot of the structure and back-story. So, instead of a virus turning humans into the living dead with rotting torsos, in “Falling Skies,” it’s slimy, scary aliens and their monstrous killer robots doing the damage.
Instead of turning folks into zombies, here, the aliens have killed off millions of adults and have turned the children into zombie slaves with control harnesses on their backs. If a harness is removed, the kid dies — period.
Attempting to save what is left of this planet are a band of survivors. As in “Walking Dead,” there is one man, Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) — here, a history professor instead of a cop — whose wife has been killed but who still has a child, or in this case, three children. His middle son, however, has been captured by the aliens along with the children of several of the others in the band of struggling survivors.
The outstanding human characters he’s dealing with are a pediatrician (Moon Bloodgood), the survivors’ military leader (Will Patton) and killer/convict/gourmet chef (Collin Cunningham), who utters the unforgettable line: “For the love of God, can’t somebody please find me some olive oil!”