[Check out Mike Proper’s outstanding initial coverage of The Walking Dead, followed by Part I and Part II of the TVGA Roundtable covering AMC’s new zombie fest.]
Hi Mike, Samantha, and Lucas (and love that the TVGA Roundtable is growing by the day!),
One of the reasons that Stephen King’s The Stand is one of my favorite novels is that it captures not just the creepy thrilling terror of surviving an apocalypse (or at least its first devastating phases, the “super flu” in The Stand’s case), but the human qualities that might come out of the complete removal of anything close to what we would call civilization.
The Walking Dead, in its 90-minute premiere, reminded me of why I love King’s masterpiece while it began to establish its own unique and wonderful qualities. Touching on something that Samantha wrote about, The Walking Dead is a visually mesmerizing show, a remarkable feat considering that one of the “main characters” is a seemingly unending horde of flesh-hungry zombies. And I think we’re at the point where we clearly have to praise AMC for producing both the best stories and the best looking stories (with HBO, Showtime, and FX arguably in the mix as well). Now that we can take Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Rubicon, and the first episode of The Walking Dead together, there’s a “formula” here that is creating a high bar for every other network to try and match.
What is that formula? I’d argue that it’s letting smart and creative people create compelling television without the typical bullshit and interference that is so inherent in the production of such milquetoast fare on the networks in particular. Who would have ever thought that a television show about zombies could become event television, for instance? It’s risky on multiple levels: the zombie genre is so well mined in films that there’s huge potential to fall into one of a hundred clichéd traps rather easily (and that’s why the more successful zombie flicks tend to be satires these days, such as Zombieland and Sean of the Dead).
So it’s pretty cool that The Walking Dead doesn’t try to do anything that outrageous within the zombie genre. The zombies became zombies somehow (and I’m curious to find out more of the backstory here) and bite others, causing them to become zombies until shot through the head (or have their brains smashed, or something, presumably). They’re not vampire zombies or flying zombies or even talking/intellectual zombies or anything else. They’re your typically groaning and dumbly mute monsters who used to be our friends and neighbors, deeply disturbing in of itself.
Therefore the show opts to base its story and momentum around an as yet small band people who have survived. I for one can’t wait to learn more about them and their adventures in surviving such a mind blowing set of circumstances.
