The six-episode-long first season of The Walking Dead wrapped up last night, and though I’ve been watching the show since it started, I’ll be damned if I gave a shit. Spoilers—for both the show and the comic it’s based on—after the jump.
Okay, first: I’m not just some grumpy fanboy who’s angry the show deviated from the comic. The Walking Dead comic, while definitely solid, is hardly great. But while The Walking Dead‘s TV pilot was focused, engaging, and dark, and improved on the comics quite a bit—fleshing out the book’s often-thin characters, having those characters talk like real people talk, and crafting some truly creepy zombie effects and some genuinely chilling situations—I think the series lost a huge amount of steam as it continued week to week. I suspect I might be in the minority on this, though.
While I’m glad the show started veering off in different directions from the comics, I do wish the directions they’d gone in were… well, better. If nothing else, I find it confusing why show-runner Frank Darabont was unable or unwilling to stick to the core of what makes the comic successful: survival, on weekly, daily, hourly basis. Whether they’re bumping along back roads in a reeking RV or holed up in a prison, the survivors in Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, Tony Moore, and Cliff Rathburn’s comic more or less live each day like it’s their last, ’cause it might very well be. There’s a single-minded determination running through the series, kept on track by the grim knowledge that no character is safe from death or, at the very least, grievous bodily harm, whether it’s caused by a zombie bite or another survivor. (On the extreme side of this, there’s some ugly, brutal rape shit in the comics that raises my hackles for any number of reasons; even on a somewhat “lighter” side of wacky apocalyptic shenanigans, Rick, the main character of both the book and the show, still gets his hand chopped off and his pregnant wife killed in front of him.) The Walking Dead, as a comic, is too stylized to ever feel “real,” but it still feels dire, and while it certainly stumbles (god, it gets boring sometimes, and it’s sometimes such a challenge to keep the book’s characters separate that, for a while, Kirkman et al. included a yearbook-like roster in the book to help readers in their attempts to keep the characters straight), it has it where it counts: It’s a no-holds-barred piece of survival fiction where some of the characters’ obstacles happen to be reanimated corpses.
Much of that was in the pilot. From episode two on, though, we got:
• cartoony racist Southerner being cartoonishly racist
• gangsters who at first seem all scary and mean and ethnic but are really sweeties who have hearts of gold and enjoy playing pinochle with the helpless, doomed elderly
• sisterly discussions about fishing that thuddingly foreshadow one fishin’ sister dying 20 minutes later
• displays of spousal abuse that thuddingly foreshadow an abusive spouse dying 20 minutes later
• being expected to abruptly give a shit about people we’ve been hastily introduced five minutes prior by some character reading lines carefully crafted by the Expositron 5000
• more mopey sentimentality than an Elliot Smith memorial concert
• for no discernible reason, zombies being called “geeks”
• “Son, I know all I’ve been saying over and over is how I just wanted to find you and save you and your mother and be together as a family in the apocalypse—believe you me, I know that’s my character’s sole motivation, here—and while I want you to know that you are, no doubt about it, the single most important thing to me in this whole wide zombie-filled world, well, I also need to let you know that there’s this cartoony racist Southerner I barely know, you see, who’s probably dead back in Atlanta, where we left him to die, but, you see, even if he’s somehow survived, he’s totally going to become a major villain in season two, so—while I’d like to reiterate how very important you are to me—I’m really going to need to go risk my life by venturing once again into the most dangerous place I can think of in order to check up on this guy, you see, and, if at all possible, set him free.”
• 47 hours of buildup re: an incredibly boring extramarital affair that didn’t even end with a little kid shooting the dude who slept with his mom while said kid’s dad was in a coma
• a PowerPoint seminar that attempted to answer a question no one asked re: how zombieism works (presumably followed by a thrilling lecture about midichlorians)
• the ship from the end of Close Encounters doubling as the set for the CDC
• for no discernible reason, the CDC exploding
Phew. What say you, Walking Dead viewers? Am I nitpicking things to death, or was The Walking Dead‘s first season really that mediocre?
I fell sound asleep during the first episode, so I couldn’t say.
I’m assuming they stuck to six episodes because it wasn’t yet greenlighted for a second season? If that’s the case, I would imagine better writing and plotting next time around. Otherwise, yeah, it’s not amazing but it’s better than anything on the networks.
Speaking of which, I look forward to zombified versions of sitcoms/police procedural dramas/game shows on network tv.
It was okay. I’m not going to write off the show or comic, but I don’t think they’re going the to transform the horror genre anytime soon. And, despite WD’s greater ratings, Mad Men is still the best thing about AMC.
Thin characters can be okay sometime, but WD has thin characters whom we’re supposed to find riveting. I recently took up the comic, and found Kirkman’s intro to Vol. 1 about how he wanted it to be character-driven and such to be kind of obnoxious. The people he introduced me to weren’t nearly interesting enough to warrant such attention.
Simple characters in genre pieces are fine (oftentimes they’re just accessories for the plot) but simple, flat characters held up as if they have depth- that’s aggravating. Lost did the same thing. Fortunately, WD promises to have, at the least, a more coherent plot.
Aside from that, the term “geeks” was just odd. Others have probably remarked as much, but I just kept imagining Nick Frost saying “Don’t say that! Don’t say the zed word!”
It isn’t the greatest show ever, but I enjoy it.
Maybe you just had too high of expectations?
I gave up after three episodes. For me, there were two main problems with The Walking Dead:
1. Like just about every other depiction of zombies over the last 42 years, they stole their ideas whole cloth from George Romaro. Night of the Living Dead was truly frightening, mainly because Romaro created a completely original kind of monster and kind of monster movie. Since then, the mindless reanimated corpse whose whole purpose is to devour the living has become nothing but a lazy cliché and a remarkably boring monster, since it has no personality. There have been a few original zombies since 1968 (e.g., the “Zeppo” episode of Buffy, Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game), but The Walking Dead brought nothing new to the table.
2. The human characters in The Walking Dead were just as clichéd as the zombies, and had little more personality. Seriously, did anyone give a damn about the love triangle involving the two cops?
Total letdown. The entire episode arc was driven by the twin conceits that
a) It is impossible to find diesel fuel in Atlanta.
and
b) Suicide becomes infinitely more palatable when an unfeeling machine intelligence offers to light the air in your lungs on fire and explode you.
@ cat & beard: It got greenlighted for a second season prior to the first episode airing.
@ Erik: The comic is better than the show. No doubt. But since they are different stories in the same universe and using many of the same characters it’s like getting two serials in The Walking Dead universe. Given my affection for the universe, I love that, and can overlook that one of the serials is less good than the other.
Even though it doesn’t stand up to its inspiration, it’s still far better than the vast majority of what one finds on the television.
And reading the commentary of the people who are most vehemently hateful toward the TV series leads me to believe that none of them ever read the comic.
The TV series is MUCH better if you’ve read the comic.
“The TV series is MUCH better if you’ve read the comic.”
That may be the case, but it’s a poor advertisement if you haven’t read ’em.
Every time you have a story about the walking dead you are pretty much stealing a page from George Romaro’s book. Before Living Dead zombies (in folklore) were the product of voodoo rituals usually designed to take over the body of Haitian sugar workers and make them work themselves to death.
as for geek, it comes form the circus geeks who would chase live chickens around a stage or pen and then bite off their heads. Replace chickens with humans, it makes sense.
I agree that this show needs to pick things up. What made the remake of Dawn of the Dead so good was the urgency. The faster zombies might as well have been Cameron’s aliens. To keep a zombie show going you need to have a constant looming threat of zombies. Haven’t we learned from vampires that feelings totally fuck up the horror factor?
I liked the show enough. But I guess if I had to make an ill-fitting analogy (which is kind of what I do) I’d say that the Pilot was such an achievement that the next 5 episodes felt like a theater company drunk on opening night success clumsily stumbling around the stage for the next 5 weeks.
The biggest complaint I can make about the characterizations is that they weren’t consistent. Andrea has now TWICE pulled a gun on Rick with every intent of blowing his brains out. There have been zero repercussions. We’ve been told and shown that these characters wouldn’t react to an internal threat like that – and yet, they apparently lugged Merle’s dumb ass around, so maybe they would. They surrounded Jim like they were gonna put him in one of those holes he dug, and then after he’s bit and asks to get left behind, everyone lovingly says their goodbyes at the tree? Where were all those loving goodbyes when Jacqui asked to get left behind?
This is different than characters just acting dumb. We need our heroes to be stupid in the face of the end of humanity, otherwise there’d be no conflict, and we couldn’t relate to these people. I don’t mind that these guys make stupid mistakes, what I mind is that their mistakes, and those reactions to them, are fueled by nothing more than plot necessity. They’re not characters at that point. They’re crutches for a hobbled storyline.
That looks much more like Cheryl Tiegs than Cher.
I like it. Haven’t read the comics, love slow zombies. Is it better than Breaking Bad? Nope. It’s still the only zombie show on TV, so as long as it doesn’t go all Heroes-season-3, I’ll watch.
Zombieland improved when Bill Murray showed up. If the Walking Dead adds Bill Murray to the cast next season, it’ll be better than this season. Bill Murray improves everything.
Am I the only person to notice that the conceit of a guy waking out of a coma in a deserted hospital to find himself in a dystopian zombie nightmare world is a direct rip-off of 28 Days Later?
I was enjoying it until someone made a pretty solid set of comparisons between S1’s structure and episodes of “Lost.”
Thankfully, they fired the writing staff and are going freelance. That should hopefully help clear out the sometimes flimsy writing and characters.
Loved the comic and like how they’ve kept the key characters just as integral and are developing them nicely, especially Rick. That’s still very true to the comic and very well done in both versions of the story that now exist.
Weird, I wouldn’t have guessed I was the only one commenting here who feels strongly the other way. I think it’s great. I haven’t read the comics. I’m not bothered by any plot similarities to anything else (all zombie movies are pretty homogeneous aren’t they?) because I’m so excited by the prospect of a muted zombie epic that spans longer than two hours.
Again, weird. I can’t believe I’m the only one nerding out without reservations. I blog about Glee.
I’m with Dave Bow. I love it. And I’ve only read SOME of the comics.
@PDXWahine: Hey, I liked season 3 of Heroes. It was season 2 what sucked all of the life out of the show and its viewers.
I dig the Walking Dead comics that I’ve read (the first volume). But as a longtime fan of the shambling undead, I’m wary of zombie glut. I will try to check it out when I’m awake some time, though.
@Dave & Kiala: I’ve really enjoyed the show (up until the finale), and haven’t read any of the comics. But I think, for a drama at least, those sort of nagging questions and lazy scriptwriting that Erik & Fatboy talk about act as barnacles on the ship of my enjoyment.
A few every so often are fine, but too many and the… um… ship of my enjoyment… becomes slow, unwieldy, and prone to pirate attacks.
This show is pretty great. Superior to Mad-Men, which is boring, gimicky, and uninspired, with a one dimensional, unlikeable cast to boot. Not that walking dead isn’t gimicky, but it’s executed well. I have never seen or heard of the comic. But Breaking Bad is the hands down best show on TV!
@ Tommy: No, you’re just the first one to mention it.
I think it’s bad. I think it’s super wussy. Too many feelings-driven decisions from characters I have been given no reason to care about, or based on thin relationships that develop on episode-by-episode basis purely to move the plot around. I want less empty gun pulling and more actual shooting people in the head. Zombie gore is fun and all, but a band of survivors in crazy-dire and stressful circumstances is way more interesting—yet the writers decided instead to focus on crappy quests and overblown, unconvincing interpersonal dramas. I’m glad the writing staff was fired. I liked the pilot, I hope the second season grows its balls back. (Or whatever the feminist equivalent of that phrase is, I forget.)
The problem is that, in the comics, the zombies are just the impetus for the unfolding character drama. In that context, it doesn’t matter who is ripping off who. It could be any kind of set-up that would place human beings in a similar situation, like The Road or something. In the TV series, the characters are cliche, inconsistent and boring, so you give fuck-all about what happens to them. Also, a bunch of Army-reservists fixated on first person shooters tune in expecting zombie apocalypse and AMC tries to pander to them instead of handing them the remote. We got the worst of both worlds in season 1: characters that literary types are unimpressed with, and zombies that well, zombies, are unimpressed with.