by Thinus Ferreira
4 TVs out of 10
The dull The Hot Zone: Anthrax on National Geographic (DStv 181 / StarSat 220) is a skippable and tepid follow-up in the Hot Zone anthology series that falls short of the much better first season, with the bland Daniel Dae-Kim led 6-episodes that feel like an under-budget NCIS-episode.
While the first season of The Hot Zone in 2019 explored the medical discovery of the Ebola virus, the second season is more of chase scene of the Anthrax terror mailer in 2001 - a crime procedural following a CSI-lite approach that has been done much better by other American TV series.
The Hot Zone: Anthrax feels more The X-Files heated up with people standing around in FBI jackets trying to find a suspect(s), than an exercise in exploring Anthrax and its devastating consequences and possibilities in the way that the first season did with Ebola.
While Ebola in the first season of The Hot Zone felt terrifying, claustrophobic, world-altering and smothering, The Hot Zone: Anthrax feels like a lightly-dusted sprinkling of a crime caper for a (white) Christmas with little to no sense of tangible paranoia.
The microbiology and science have largely been pushed aside in the dramatisation of The Hot Zone: Anthrax for a script and procedural acting that could be a Criminal Minds episode if the names are swapped and replaced.
Daniel Dae Kim as a microbiologist FBI agent can only do so much with what he's given - rather skip The Hot Zone: Anthrax on National Geographic and watch him on Netflix in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Blink of an Eye" in the 6th season to really see what he's capable of as an actor.
One real-world irony - and something that would have been interesting to explore in interviews with the cast or producers - is how it was filming The Hot Zone: Anthrax during a real global pandemic in the form of the Covid-19 coronavirus - but National Geographic didn't do anything with that opportunity.
The Hot Zone: Anthrax - although the hard information about the Anthrax attacks are available on Wikipedia, history books and in media reports - is very formulaic and paint-by-numbers through all 6 of its episodes right up until its (boring?) conclusion.
While mostly everything is also known about Ebola and its Africa discovery and arrival in America, the producers in the first season of The Hot Zone with Julianna Margulies managed to build the exploration of the scientific facts and the tracking of the virus into a gripping mystery story, filled with a sense of foreboding dread, some scary visuals, dramatic irony and paced "revelations".
The Hot Zone: Anthrax has very little of any of that - as if the National Geographic producers just took the overlay of "The Hot Zone" as a name, and thinly powdered "anthrax" over it without any meticulous work to craft any compelling kind of virology exploration or origin story into it.
National Geographic's The Hot Zone: Anthrax is part of the batch of glut-TV of our era that shouldn't have been made - just more TV with little to say or actually add in terms of entertainment introspection about something that could have been interesting, entertaining and informative.
If there ever is to be a The Hot Zone: Covid, hopefully National Geographic manages to do better than the dull The Hot Zone: Anthrax pastiche.
