The highly rated AMC series, “The Walking Dead,” is something I’ve been meaning to watch for quite some time. “After all,” I thought, “it’s been on the air for five seasons now, it’s gotta be good!”
Ignoring the fact that this plague they’ve constructed contains inconsistencies you could drive a boat through, there is such a substantial lack of plot that I am dumbstruck the show has lasted this long. Each episode drags at a snails pace with the same scenarios repeating over and over again. The migraine inducing sounds of hacking, rasping, dead folk are far overused. Although perhaps giving the zombies such a prominent voice detracts from the weak dialogue between the living.
Still the most common gripe I heard about the series, before ever watching it, was that the main characters were killed off too frequently. “Oh no!” I thought, “I’ll start to care about one of these people and he or she is going be ripped apart by a zombie.”
Except that never happened. In all four seasons I’ve watched there has been so little character development that it’s a wonder the writers haven’t just killed all of them off at once. With ample opportunities for a storyline or even flashbacks to give us some idea of who these people are and why should we care the writers take- zero. I understand that survival is the premise, which doesn’t include reminiscing about a life pre-apocalypse or building relationships with your fellow survivors that are at the very least- interesting. The most important thing is to kill the zombies! But does that make for compelling television? Apparently. So far it’s been enough to stay on the air for almost 6 seasons.
Don’t get me wrong, the writing is not without some creativity. Zombie annihilation takes all sorts of gnarly and fantastic forms in this series, showing that there is a trace of imagination. As I recall in the most recent episode I watched endured, a “walker” fell through a dilapidated blood soaked roof only to be ripped open on the fall-through. Except he remained hanging from the ceiling by his bloody, tangled intestines. Yes. But of course this predicament was not a concern and he remained dead-set (he-heh) on reaching for the delicious humans beneath him. I also quite liked it when a zombie, surrounded by a hoard of other zombies, had his entire head squished through the holes of a fence while trying to reach the people who found safety at a prison yard. Apparently when you turn to a zombie your head also turns to silly putty. But other than those brief moments of grotesqueness bordering on hilarity the show moves at the pace of… a zombie.
“Nobody ever mentioned just how boring the end of the world was gonna be.” Beth, S 4 Ep. 3.
Boy, you said it!
