The Passage S1

Based on Justin Cronin’s bestselling novel, this series sees a pair of doctors hunting for the cure to all of humanity’s diseases, and finding it, in the form of a 250-year-old man in a Bolivian cave. The man, it turns out, is a vampire (of course), and he turns one of the doctors into Patient Zero for the virus that has potential to save humans from any and every illness.

Fast-forward a few years, and there is a whole laboratory full of patients who have volunteered to test the virus in their own bodies. They’re death-row inmates, see, and they’ve traded their sentence for their flesh. But what the doctors and scientists haven’t foreseen is that the half-human-half-vampires, all of whom were violent criminals when they were mere mortals, have telepathic powers and super-human strength, and are contemplating escape.

But then the scientists realise that they’ve been making a terrible mistake. They should have been testing the virus/vaccine on a child all along. Where to find a child that no one will notice is missing? That’s where ex-Special Forces agent Brad Wolgast comes in. He’s tasked with kidnapping a recently orphaned 10-year-old girl called Amy, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he and Amy go on the run, and develop a father-daughter bond on the way.

This bond is the strength of the show, writes The Guardian: “The developing father-daughter bond between Brad and Amy (a performance by 12-year-old Saniyya Sidney that belies her years and the fact that her character description for such a sturdy workhorse of a production surely comprised two words at most: ‘Sassy, scrappy’) … pulls it all together. Sidney and Gosselaar have real chemistry, sparking and bantering but nailing their (unsentimental) emotional moments as they grieve their losses. They lift the credibility of the whole thing, and are far better than they need to be.”