[Editor's note: Welcome to another session of the TV Geek Army Roundtable! Last time around, we delved into the best TV finales of all time. For The Walking Dead, Mike Proper will kick things off weekly with an always stellar review (check out the pilot review, called "Days Gone By," here), and then we turn things over to the roundtable for further reaction, analysis, and fun-like banter.]
Hello all,
Hope everyone had a great Halloween. Mine was pretty good, went to a party dressed as Jax from Sons of Anarchy (after spending about 6 hours painting the reaper logo on a vest with Liquid Paper and Sharpies), but it would be hard to top the Halloween that AMC had for itself. Ratings for last night's premiere of The Walking Dead are starting to trickle in and it looks like the show is a huge hit. I know I liked it, and judging by his review, our buddy Mike Proper liked it, and if the ratings are to be trusted about 5,299,998 other people probably liked it as well. That's right, 5.3 million people tuned in to the show's first airing at 10 PM last night. "It's a good day to be dead," said AMC president Charlie Collier in a statement after the great numbers were announced.
Now that all the pats on the back have been made, let's dive into the show. Mike, in your review you mentioned that you were excited about the possibilities that the serialized television show format has to offer the zombie genre. I couldn't agree with you more -- the longer format allows The Walking Dead to explore many more facets of the zombie apocalypse than a two-hour movie could dream of. It frustrates me that zombie movies are always forced, due to time constraints I assume, to pick and choose which parts of the overall zombie-universe to expose us to. Take Zombieland, for example, which is by most accounts a decent zombie flick (90% on Rotten Tomatoes).
Zombieland does a great job of breaking down the various "rules" to surviving a zombie apocalypse (double-tap, always wear your seat belt, beware of bathrooms, etc.) and a decent job of fleshing out the importance of human relationships, scarce as they may be, in a world full of the undead. But Zombieland nearly entirely ignores one of my favorite zombie genre themes: the origin story. I like to know where my zombies come from. If zombies were asparagus, I'd buy 'em at the farmers market. Was it a government experiment gone wrong? A virus that has mutated out of control? Give me details, the more, the better. I hope the television format of The Walking Dead allows the show to give us a clear picture of how these particular zombies came to be, without having to sacrifice from other areas.
Is anyone else at all worried that the first season is only six episodes long? Is that enough time to force the creators of the show to give us something that we haven't seen before? I mean, to be honest, as good and as scary as "Days Gone Bye" was, it wasn't really anything earth shattering in terms of the genre. We have seen the guy wake up in the hospital only to realize it has been overrun with zombies. We have seen the guy on a mission to find his wife and kids. We have seen the family have to decide whether or not to put a loved one out of her misery after she has become undead. We have seen the trek across vast distances in hopes of finding a refugee camp only to find more zombies. My fear is that if the writers were lazy (and I'm not accusing them of being so, I'm merely playing devil's advocate) they could find 5 more episode's worth of material pretty easily, without having to expand the zombie genre (which is, I think, what everyone hopes the show does, expand the genre). What do you guys think?
Gunshot ain't enough?
Lucas
