This rule is named for Rick Rosenthal, the poor chappie saddled with the horrific duty of churning out not one, but two, of the lamest sequels in the history of sequels: Halloween II and the not-very-well-known and frankly-largely-best-forgotten The Birds II: Land's End. (Yep, they sequelled Hitchcock. How the man gets out of bed of a morning is anyone's guess.)

What then must we make of prequels, the unholy stepchild of sequels, which seem to so desperately claw at the bottom of the metaphorical creative well, that they draw up bucket after bucket of mud where clear, gorgeous, Emmy-winning water once flowed.

With that in mind, Fear the Walking Dead (FX, Monday, 1.30pm and 8.30pm) must be approached with the harshest of eyes. Certainly the idea of milking one of the most successful cable television dramas of all time by dialling it back to day one, hour one, minute one of its zombie plague outbreak is enough to make your limbs drop off. (Cue screaming.)

In truth, Fear the Walking Dead is actually rather excellent, though the jury may still be out on some of the arcs of its longer-term storytelling, and what we all truly fear but cannot yet give voice to: that moment when season four of Fear the Walking Dead and season one of The Walking Dead cross paths and the fabric of the time-space continuum is irreparably torn.

Where its original played for cool zombie effects and overt gore, the prequel seems to play closer to the medical horror playbook, with infections and encroaching dread dominating the early storytelling. In this world we meet an assortment of characters - single mother Madison, teacher Travis, scruffy Frank (someone buy him a brush, please), free-spirited Liza and others - who are about to come face to face with "the infected".

And yet this seems worlds away from The Walking Dead. And in that sense, it might be Neighbours, albeit set in an Erinsborough where everyone starts turning into zombies. (And oh, what a delightful fantasy that would be. It would certainly freshen up the ratings.)

Across the dial, and neither sequel nor prequel, we find the second season of Utopia (ABC, Wednesday, 9.30pm). An original work, though in tone and texture the Working Dog team seem to have borrowed very gently from one of their earlier works, Frontline, which was, in the day, an excoriating assessment of current affairs which had a lasting impact, both on television comedy generally, and the current affairs world it set out to mock.

Utopia is a comedy about the vast public service bureaucracy, and how it is shaped to serve the hollow vision of its government masters, the result being a crucible in which good ideas are gradually bent out of shape to fit 10-second media soundbites until they are unrecognisable, useless, or both. It's a brilliant show, though to some extent it is undermined by the fact that, presently at least, the nightly news serves up a daily dose of government stupidity, which perhaps leaves little room for the genuine satirists.

But like the Nation Building Authority in which it is set, Utopia is a versatile beast. The comedy plays as effective a scalpel against corporations and big business, as it does government and building planning. Utopia owes as much to Working Dog's own The Hollowmen, as it does to bigger, more historic pieces in the genre, such as Yes, Minister.

Rob Sitch is superb as Tony, the perfect corporate everyman: he could be brilliant at his job (whatever that happens to be) if only he weren't hampered by the bureaucracy around him, and people like public relations manager Rhonda (played brilliantly by Kitty Flanagan). You know her, you probably work with her, though between the slogans and the vision boards, you've probably never got a word in edgewise.