CW's 'Containment': No zombies, but plenty to fear

The phrase

zombie apocalypse

comes up in the premiere Tuesday of the CW's new drama

Containment

, which moves into the

iZombie

time slot this week.

But fans of that whimsical series about the undead - and AMC's behemoth hit The Walking Dead - might want to, er, contain their excitement: People aren't on the menu in Containment, which serves up its scares with sides of science and public policy.

Humans may instead be like the lab rats used to study a deadly virus that breaks out, conveniently enough, in Atlanta, home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the setting for a massive quarantine effort.

Or, as Containment's officious federal representative, Dr. Sabine Lommers (Claudia Black), prefers to call it, a cordon sanitaire, a fancy French way of saying this isn't just another Grey's Anatomy plot point.

The outbreak of a virus that's highly contagious and 100 percent fatal should probably be higher on the list of things that keep us awake at night than alien invasions or zombies, but the playbooks are similar.

What happens to people when [insert fear here] strikes is the plot for every disaster movie ever. Containment, serviceably if not excitingly adapted by Julie Plec (The Vampire Diaries) from Cordon, a Belgian series, isn't out to reinvent the genre, even as it extends it to 13 episodes.

Or more. The CW, which last month announced early renewals for most of its series, including iZombie, is calling Containment a "limited event," while leaving the door open for a Season 2.

So someone's probably going to survive this thing.

Will it be Katie (Kristen Gutoskie), a teacher who gets quarantined, along with her son and the rest of his class, at the hospital where the first victims show up?

Or Leo (Trevor St. John), the not-very-ambitious police officer who gets trapped with Katie?

Among those who find themselves on different sides of a (mostly) impenetrable fence are Lex (David Gyasi), a police major who's drafted as the face of the containment effort, and his scientist girlfriend, Jana (Christina Moses), as well as Teresa (Hanna Mangan Lawrence), a heavily pregnant teen and her boyfriend, Xander (Demetrius Bridges), who's desperate to protect her.

Is the virus the result of Syrian-sponsored bioterrorism, or is that just what someone wants people to believe? Well, you can't spell Containment - or conspiracy - without con. When it's not showing us sick people who at times display at least some of the characteristics we've come to expect from TV zombies, the show's dropping hints that our real problems may begin at home.

And that fear itself might actually be our undoing.

graye@phillynews.com 215-854-5950 @elgray ph.ly/EllenGray