The 100

The 100 - too stupid to live, too cute to die.

The 100 is the CW's big-budget, post-apocalyptic tale of cute teenagers sent down from a space station and struggling to survive the rigours of Earth, 97 years after a nuclear holocaust.

The high concept is that, due to the tight rationing needs of the Ark - a space station made up of assorted individual stations that were combined after the war cut them off from the ground - all crime carries a death sentence, but for those under 18 the sentence is commuted... until their 18th birthday. With resources running out, 100 young offenders are sent to Earth to see if the surface is survivable, while on the Ark a political struggle threatens to tear apart all that is left of humanity.

I call it 'Planet of the Hunger Flies'.

The 100 crash land miles from their target point, an old FEMA supply station on Mount Weather, although a quirk of the apocalypse means that where they actually land looks more like British Columbia than Virginia (because after the nuclear winter, the Earth's surface will resemble more affordable filming locations).

The key players on the ground are the rival natural leaders Clarke Griffin, an idealist, and Bellamy Blake, a pragmatist, reckless daredevil Finn, Bellamy's hot but useless sister Octavia, Wells Jaha, the son of Ark's chancellor, and nerd bros Jasper and Monty. On the Ark, Wells' father and Clarke's mother are joined by the ruthless Kane, worker's champion Diana Sydney and hot young technician Raven (who later ends up dirtside with all the other hot young things.)

What the show does surprisingly well is mess with your expectations regarding its characters. At the start of the show, Clarke and her mother, Abby, are the obvious moral cores of their respective groups. Bellamy is an anarchist opportunist and primary antagonist, mirrored by the authoritarian Kane, Octavia is too stupid to live, Finn is a chancer and Monty and Jasper are comic relief.

As the show progresses and needs must, it is Finn and Octavia who emerge as the truly moral characters, with both Bellamy and Clarke sacrificing integrity to perceived necessity in the fact of attacks by 'Grounders', a human culture living on Earth since the war. Meanwhile Abby's flaws are revealed and both Kane and Bellamy are revealed to have compelling and sympathetic reasons for their actions, with Kane in particular emerging as one of the strongest and most sympathetic characters in the series.

The series thrives on a continuing sense of peril, with the characters rarely allowed breathing room. The Ark bounces from disaster to disaster, first as Kane tries to secure a cull of the population, then as - with direct parallels to the Titanic - it is revealed that there is only enough space to evacuate some of the remaining population to the ground. Meanwhile, on the ground, each week sees more of the kids killed, by grounders, poison or each other; it's brutal as anything (the first episode of Season 2 has the title 'The 48'), and sometimes surprising.

For all my snark above, I've enjoyed the first season of The 100 a lot, and I'm looking forward to the second, since for once a series I've got into has actually been renewed.