Tonight: CW's 'Containment' gets close and gross with viral outbreak

When most of us watch “The Walking Dead” or a movie like “28 Days Later,” we don’t actually worry about catching a zombie plague. “The Strain” doesn’t make us fear a vampire virus.

But in the real world, Ebola may be rearing its head again, and we’re told that mosquito-borne Zika is even scarier than previously thought. Who knows what new catastrophic contagion could be right around the corner?

That makes “Containment,” arriving tonight (Tuesday, April 19) on the CW, horror drama of a particularly personal kind. Divorcing ourselves from the idea that the next big disease outbreak could hit home proves difficult, especially as “Containment” finds it striking and quickly crippling Atlanta, a large city not that different in some ways from St. Louis.

People die gruesomely in “Containment,” adapted from a Belgian series by Julie Plec, co-creator of “The Vampire Diaries.” The action starts well into the outbreak, then flashes back to brief, happier days when people could still shake hands and a sneeze didn’t mean quick progression to bleeding from the eyes and nose, collapse and agonizing death.

Those in jeopardy include the obligatory busload of schoolchildren, a young pregnant woman, an immigrant family from Syria, and doctors and nurses at the hospital treating the first victims.

The government steps in to “help,” but the only solution is ordering containment, closing a chunk of Atlanta off from the rest of the city to stop the spread of the quick-incubating disease. “Only 48 hours,” the people in the quarantine zone are told. “I know it’s an inconvenience, but trust me, it will be worth it,” police insist. As if.

The point, Plec says, is to examine human behavior in the wake of a crisis, not simply to scare us.

“The stuff I like to do is always grounded in really simple but honest and deep themes of love and family and friendship,” Plec said when the CW introduced the series to TV critics meeting in Los Angeles.

“To be able to drop that into an environment that’s extremely chaotic and terrifying, it’s just it’s a different way of exploring a genre. It’s a horror genre where the monster is an illness, is a virus.”

While she was writing, life echoed art.

“About the time I was finishing my first draft, the Ebola outbreak happened, and suddenly, it was exactly the cultural conversation,” she says. “You are seeing what you are trying to portray as what could happen in a very real-world situation, and then you turn on the news, and it’s happening in the real world.”

At that point, she says, “You feel this obligation to not aggrandize it and not exploit it,” avoiding an “icky, ripped-from-the-headlines (treatment), which of course is never the intention.”

Icky, though, “Containment” certainly is. In just the first two episodes, there is enough blood and body fluid to make the strongest stomach turn.

Writers “worked really hard to be grounded” in medical realities, executive producer Chris Ord says. “We had a representative from the CDC helping us” with questions of ‘this would happen or not happen.’ By putting in those rules ... you don’t have to rely on supernatural or anything like that.”

“Containment” adheres closely to real-life disease protocols, Plec says.

“We talked to the Georgia Department of Public Health (and) were schooled very quickly in the hierarchy of how things need to happen, that it begins at a local level before it becomes the state, that the CDC doesn’t immediately come in. They come in later to take jurisdiction.”

Politics is always in play, Plec says.

“There’s a lot of ways to ruffle feathers and to get people very upset if you make assumptions. I said, ‘Well, when does the World Health Organization come in?’ They were like, ‘That’s the worst question you could have ever asked us. We are offended deeply.’ So it’s a whole world of politics and hierarchy.”

On set, actors learned they were infected when they showed up for the day, the producers said.

The makeup department “essentially created, like, five stages of the disease, different looks for all five stages,” Ord says. “We as writers could say, ‘This person is going to be at Stage 2 or Stage 4,’ or ‘They are about to die at Stage 5.’ Having that structure in place made everything stay consistent and really adhere to how the disease would affect people.”

The graphic symptoms also make “Containment” as chilling for viewers as any recent series, and those with sensitive constitutions may well find it too graphic

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