In the US: Nightly, National Geographic
In the UK: Will air later this year
Long-time readers of TMINE will know I’m a sucker for a killer virus show. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was exposure at an early age to The Andromeda Strain and The Satan Bug, or maybe the titles of Survivors scared me silly.
Whatever it was, I’ve always eagerly awaited the arrival of whatever new killer virus show has come our way, whether it be that Andromeda Strain remake, Helix, Outbreak or The Burning Zone.
The Hot Zone
The Burning Zone is of note because it was a clear reference to the definitive non-fiction killer virus book of the 90s: Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, one of the 100 ‘books that shaped a century of science’, which naturally I devoured when it came out. It was a three-pronged medical history, looking at the emergence of the Ebola virus and Marburg in Zaire, other related ‘filoviruses‘, and the arrival in the US of a strain of Ebola in 1989 and how the US army responded.
And it was frightening. So very frightening. Indeed, it was so frightening that it actually influenced how the world’s governments reacted when there was another outbreak of Ebola.
The Burning Zone was nonsense. And initially terrible. Nevertheless, it was both clearly inspired by The Hot Zone and clearly different enough that it wouldn’t infringe Preston’s copyright. Outbreak, too, was very obviously an adaptation of The Hot Zone but a sufficiently loose one that no lawsuit could have touched it.
Now, just a couple of decades later, one TV show dares to obtain the copyright clearances that others failed to acquire. It’s The Hot Zone and it’s a little bit silly, but nevertheless still very frightening.
