Script by show creator Mick Garris and ensemble acting are serviceable but pale in comparison to the cinematography of Attila Szalay, production design of Stephen Geaghan and Brian Tyler's tension-inducing orchestral score.

With so many different directors and writers involved, it's always hard to judge where anthology series may be going. But the first two episodes of Fear Itself are good, goosebumpy fun, with the deft set-ups, rousing action and surprise endings of a comic book.

Fear is pretty much like most of these genre-specific anthologies: wildly inconsistent, sometimes maddeningly so. But when it hits, it blasts the ball out of the park. When it doesn't, well, at least you have the pools of blood to keep you company.

A little tedious for the rest of us, who have seen such exploration before.

Each episode tells a different story but in the first two, it's clear the stories won't be all that different from those we've seen a million times before.

What they do have in common is wintry Canadian weather, a general lack of humor without having much serious to say and the fact that they are not particularly scary.

The only fear engendered by this series is the fear that the NBC programming department has been possessed by Satan.