“The Leftovers” violated that rule in order to tip off the audience that they wouldn’t be playing by the rules. It’s a general rule of film and television not to hurt animals - on screen, at least. READ MORE: Giancarlo Esposito is Invisible on ‘Dear White People,’ But It’s His Best Performance of the Year While both scenes will (and did) almost certainly drive viewers to the hills, only “The Leftovers” used animal brutality purposefully. For instance - and this is your trigger warning for the pilot - a dog dies within the opening minutes of each series. Perhaps it’s that “The Mist” arrives right as another head-fake drama series departs that makes the new arrival look even worse, but there really is a lot to learn from “The Leftovers” in relation to what “The Mist” gets wrong. Each becomes trapped with other local residents, including: Natalie Raven (“Six Feet Under’s” Frances Conroy), the family’s neighbor who gets curious when a horde of frogs hop en masse into her yard the town sheriff, Connor Heisel (Darren Pettie), who’s a little too rough with his inmates and a confused soldier (Okezie Morro) with no memory of who he is or where he came from, but who’s deathly afraid of whatever waits inside the mist. The family implodes just as a thick fog begins to roll into town. Without getting into too many spoilers, let’s just say their daughter, Alex (Gus Birney), goes to a high school party, and things go badly. But those two ideas shouldn’t be mutually exclusive, and through the first hour, they are. It’s an easy jump to see how one would take a complicated tale of human morality - “‘Lord of the Flies’ with cool monsters,” as film director Frank Darabont once described it - and turn it into a sci-fi conspiracy story.

In short, it’s less dynamic and more predictable. The show is very much concerned with what’s in the mist, and its pilot operates mainly to make you wonder what other gross stuff will come out of it. In the new Spike original series inspired by Stephen King’s novella, the mist is about bugs. The point is how the mist makes the characters react how fear of the unknown can drive instinctual reactions, and how those reactions reveal their true selves. Among spiritual and existential themes, the mist is about fear, and how we deal with fear. “ The Mist” employs a classic head-fake horror structure: Despite its characters constantly screaming, “What’s in the mist?” it really doesn’t matter what’s actually within the mysterious fog that takes over a small, Maine town.

Stephen kings the mist