The show has a lot of fasinating drama and great pacing, with kick-ass actors. :)
The show nicely explores things like the prevalence of private military contractors and the way in which they lack accountability in the sense that governments do. It also thoroughly explores the range of human decency and lack of it to others when survival is at stake. I especially liked the idea of the spontaneous re-emergence of "trading posts" which serve as news exchanges as well as sites for bartering for other goods.
I really liked Hawkins, in particular. Guy starts to find he really wants to defend the new home he's found for himself and his family and is caught between the dictates of his new mission (make sure the wrong people never get hold of his proof that domestic terrorists had the intention of destroying the US's population centers) and his desire to do right by his family (and his wife doesn't let him forget it).
That said, some weaknesses, I feel, are:
1. The characters, who are supposed to be smart people, don't communicate about simple shit like who's doing what. Excellent example: Stanley, Jake and Heather go to get gas from the gas pumps at a gas station. Meanwhile, Eric's running around like hell trying to cajole people into siphoning off their gas. Result: After a heroic effort on Eric's part, through no fault of his own he's a day late and a dollar short (because Jake et al got to the med-center first), and it's clear from the show that that's what the med center's people think of him. All could have been avoided if there'd been more coordination.
2. The show at times falls into using cliched gender-essentialist roles of men and women. Few women use guns, and it's usually the men who get the camera's attention (that said, ngl, Skeet Ulrich is easy on the eyes).
3. The motives of "John Smith" reveal him to have basically become an unhinged gentleman who's willing to follow the "destroy the nation to save the nation" line of reasoning. That said, Jennings and Rall's obvious complicity in attempting a cover-up definitely does not render them as saints. The obvious fact that they're intertwined so closely with the Allied Sates government indicates that J&R had other contingency plans in place, one of them being how to seize power in a weakened United States after a nuclear attack. In short, all "John Smith" ended up accomplishing was to clear the field for the very company he resented and loathed to seize power unprecedented even by pre-catastrophe standards.
So, all in all, interesting to watch and muse upon. :)