I agree. The first few episodes of Walking Dead had me interested, but as the season wore on and they focused more on the “survival and people trying to get along in extreme circumstances” aspect, it became clear that the writers weren’t really talented enough to pull that off. So basically the same thing that happened to Battlestar Galactica.

Actually, your “take the zombies out” metric applies pretty well. For example, if you take the spaceships and robots out of BSG, would I have stuck around for four seasons? Hell no. Nothing but shrill, poorly written characters? No thanks.

I always figured it was ‘your characters are getting in the way of my action’ rather than this, but it’s a different way to look at it.

With BSG, when the director said his androids had to be scary and relevant - and then showed the CG monstrosities - I knew the show wasn’t going somewhere I cared to be.

I think it is a mistake if you find yourself rooting for the zombies to kill half of the characters. Maybe it’s just me.

Jesse, you make some valid points.

That said, where else to get good quality horror?  One or two halfway decent movies a year, accompanied by dozens/hundreds/thousands of shitty SyFy-level teen-slasher crapfests that’ll show up on Hulu for free in a year or so?  A guy’s gotta have something more nutritious to consume than yet another clone of Friday the 13th or The Bloody Adventures of Freddy Krueger...

I compare Walking Dead to King’s The Stand, which is entirely premised on an ultimate conflict between good and evil.  Plenty of dead and infected types (at the beginning), but trailing off into a weird Las-Vegas-is-literally-Hell vibe by the end.  After God/The-Big-Man/The-Dude-Upstairs (literally) reaches down and sets things right after apparently ignoring it for months, where can you go?  I prefer where I think Walking Dead is going (although I am worried the writers will let us down…)

What would you have as Walking Dead‘s overarching theme except the human aspect of interesting people trying to cope with extraordinary situations which test them all, some to the breaking point?

The little-girl-lost thing is kind of irritating, I’ll admit.  However, the sheriff’s kid getting shot totally out of the blue is the kind of realistic backhand slapdown from God/The Universe that makes it better than average, IMHO.

I can’t get too down on it, because I hope it’s seen as successful and that other/better works are coming down the pike.  I definitely enjoy each episode, flawed as they may be…

What kind of a “quality tv” creative team has nobody in it who knows that Baptist churches don’t have crucifixes in them?

UGH so right. I didn’t even finish this week’s episode. The near-rape thing was sad and terrible and awful but a reasonable storyline, but now they’re trying to make that character all sympathetic and desirable again. The guy who nearly shot his ‘best friend’ in the woods. Also, that near-rapey character is gruff towards the kid, and the mom says, ‘You CRUSHED him!!!1!’ Uh. Lady. Your kid has thus far survived the zombie apocalypse. He’s probably not such a delicate flower at this point, and that whole line of inquiry is annoying.

The survivors are just so stupid and unlikable.  It’s hard not to root for the zombies.

Lori trying to get Shane to stay after his drunken attempted assault?  Made no sense. 

The dad having to be talked out of leaving his dying son’s side a dozen times?  Made no sense.

It’s like Terra Nova, where the dinosaurs are interrupted by way too much “wholesome family” nonsense.

But…we’re still sticking with it for a few weeks more.  Crap, we watched “V” last year.  They were just as stupid.

I wish all the vampires and all the zombies would kill each other. Zombies stopped being scary and started being annoying back in the previous century.
And I agree the characters in Walking Dead are stupid and unlikeable. The writers seem to think that argumentative rednecks are “grittily realistic” or something.

It’s like Terra Nova, where the dinosaurs are interrupted by way too much “wholesome family” nonsense.

Oh god. I watched the pilot and… ugh. It’s like you pitch an idea to a TV exec, and they say, “Hmm, time travel and dinosaurs, you say? I like it, but it needs more boring, mostly white teenagers.”

I’m still with the Walking Dead so far, mainly because the pilot was frickin’ great. And I’m a sucker for apocalypse. And maybe rednecks? I think that’s actually been one of the things the show’s done pretty good so far is showing tensions within the group do to people being mashed together because they’re not zombies.

The thing that made me less than in love with BSG was the “....and they have a plan.” aspect. Nothing cool ever came out of that. I’d rather have watched a series that took the first episode “33” as a template and was about them running from Cylons and was generally bleak. I don’t think a lot of people would have liked that show.

I’m not a fan of the zombie genre as I commonly find it presented.

The zombie media I’ve consumed all seems to take place in near contemporary times, the present or very close future, and generally consists of people trying to survive being eaten The stories are just about the mere tip of a zombie apocalypse and I find them boring. There’s so much room to tell other stories within a world which the dead rise than that of sheer survival and guilt-free gore.

I want to consume zombie media in which human society has adapted to the rise of zombies and explore what societies might be like. How would people in general handle it? What would happen to religion?

I’d like to explore the consequence of different zombie rules. What if everyone who dies comes back, instead of just those who are bitten? What if zombies retained their intelligence, and even personalities? What kind of society and culture would zombies create if they retained some of their previously human aspects? There’s been some exploration of rage-zombies (Pontypool, 28 Days Later, The Crazies) but those films are still stuck at the point of apocalypse.

With the Walking Dead, and I haven’t read the comic, I find myself watching it for an exploration of zombies but all I’m getting is character drama with zombies as a sort of scenery. But in order for character drama to be good there has to be interesting characters and interesting situations to put them in which, staggeringly, The Walking Dead lacks. All the women in the show are useless for advancing the plot, which is sexist writing; the men are repugnant, not very smart, or not given any screen time if they are watchable; and the children are props being used to cheaply tie down the other characters for some reason only the writers care about.

It’d be nice if there was some human element, theme, or philosophy featured in the series other than “survival” and “stick together” and “white people are good” and “Rick is Jesus” but the show seems to toy with an idea, like for example the ability to choose when and how to die, seemingly for a moment only to forget it ever existed in subsequent episodes.

Still, The Killing has set an awfully low bar for bad writing, cheap and unbelievable plot twists, and out-and-out betrayal of the audience.  I really wish I liked The Walking Dead more, but I plan to keep watching it. It will, at minimum, provide me with a zombie fix, if nothing else. 

On the other hand, you couldn’t pay me to watch Season 2 of The Killing.

What kind of a “quality tv” creative team has nobody in it who knows that Baptist churches don’t have crucifixes in them?

the kind who are aware that maybe not all churches are the same, even in the same denomination?

Scotch Village Baptist Church in NS. note that thing on the back wall.

I know it’s fun to be know it all and smug. I personally get a kick out of it, that’s for damn sure. but framing your experience as the only kind of experience and then using it to claim continuity errors on IMDB is perhaps not the best activity.

BTW I think Terra Nova is a great show.

All the best shows have at their core a premise like “let’s go back 85 million years to save humanity” and then fill the episodes with other, completely unrelated plots that could be done in any other kind of genre, like fighting off pesky birds.

Tune in next week when the Shannon family discuss the macroeconomics of wheat harvesting and the responsibilities of pet ownership.

@14:  “That thing on the back wall” is a cross, not a crucifix. 

Don’t know what my comment had to do with either continuity errors or IMDB.

And, no, I still have never heard of an actual Baptist church with an actual crucifix in it.

(A better argument might have been that, just as The Walking Dead takes place in a world without George Romero movies—at least according to its creator on last night’s The Talking Dead episode—perhaps it also takes place in a world in which Baptist churches have crucifixes in them. Still, it would have made a lot more sense to either: a) not have a crucifix in that church or b) make the church belong to a denomination that actually features crucifixes in its churches.)

note that thing on the back wall.

You mean the thing that doesn’t have a Jesus on it?

karpad: When you’re being all know it all, helps to know what you’re talking about.

I read the first big collection of the comics the show is based on, and I have to say the source material is also pretty lackluster.  I haven’t watched the show yet because of that, but the comics very quickly fell into a predictable pattern of “here’s some new characters oh gee they’re unhappy about something that isn’t zombies, maybe that will come into play later but not right now let’s just walk around and talk about nothing for a few more pages”.  Maybe it all comes together later, but once new faces start making you annoyed I think it’s time to pack it in.  I just couldn’t care about anyone there, no matter how much I wanted to.

Ironically the same author did a pretty interesting series of comics called Marvel Zombies, which posits the question: what happens when Spider-Man, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, and all their super-powered buddies get the uncontrollable urge to constantly devour human flesh?  Surprisingly far more in-depth than you might think; it becomes a sweeping narrative for a while there, although the last book in the series was handed off to a bunch of other authors and the story basically falls apart.  My roommate loved Marvel Zombies despite having only read a few X-men comics back in the 90s, so apparently it’s something you can enjoy without being a huge comic book nerd.  If you’re looking for some cheesy zombie goodness I highly recommend it.  Just stay away if the author isn’t Robert Kirkland.

Ben@#13: I’d forgotten about the US version of The Killing.  I don’t think you can make that material work without a lead actress as compelling as Sofie Gråbøl.

RT @ 12: For your criteria, a good zombie-ish sort of society seen from the outside, the Revers from Firefly might count as that.  I can’t really think of others (maybe Shaun of the Dead at the end when they are incorporating the undead as cheap muscle labor?)  Could be interesting, but too outside the box for tv IMO.  TV execs aren’t exactly the biggest risk takers around.

“the kind who are aware that maybe not all churches are the same, even in the same denomination?”

No, not all churches are the same, even in the same denomination, but a Baptist church with a crucifix (as opposed to a cross, which is what the vast majority sport) is an unusual enough thing that people are going to fucking notice.  It’s not a hard mistake to avoid making.

I want to consume zombie media in which human society has adapted to the rise of zombies and explore what societies might be like. How would people in general handle it?

The comic book series does this.  It’s gone on for around six or seven years now so they’re dealing with society-building, where to live, who has authority and why, etc.  There’s a reason the comic book fans went all crazy when Merle cut his hand off, for example.  It was a hint of a future character that also deals with some of the issues you bring up.  Unfortunately I found the writing in the comic book series to be even more superficial than the television series, so I haven’t gotten too far yet.

I understand people being annoyed by the silliness of the horror genre in general, but I don’t really get this argument that your quality measurement is based on taking out the central conceit of the program.  The zombies are the show.

I watched the first season on netflix because I like all things zombie, but it’s really hard to care about any of the characters they’re all whiney, and some of the plot lines are just stupid, like in the first season when they are fighting with another group for a bag of guns.  This is america, one thing we have plenty of is guns. 

@12:  I’d like to explore the consequence of different zombie rules. What if everyone who dies comes back, instead of just those who are bitten? What if zombies retained their intelligence, and even personalities? What kind of society and culture would zombies create if they retained some of their previously human aspects?

See, and that’s exactly why I’m still watching. I haven’t read any of the source material, so I might be just waaay wrong. And who knows how far the show will deviate from said material anyway.  But there have been a lot of subtle and a few less subtle cues that at least some of the zombies have retained something of who they were. They’re mostly in those times we see zombies who aren’t actively trying to feed, or just before they realize they can feed.

I’ll be sorely disappointed if nothing ever comes of that. That these things have been merely been put in place for set design or a few cheap plot points that are never explored. But I’m willing to stick it out a little longer until it becomes obvious the writers are too afraid to tip that hand.

Bullshit, Amanda! Y’all are missing the BIG PICTURE here.

There’s a dude on the show who shoots the zombies with a crossbow. A fecking crossbow!

Others on the show have guns and and knives and whatnot to ‘kill’ the walking dead. Firearms and ammunition don’t appear to be terribly scarce, but this cat’s running around shooting zombies with a fecking crossbow?

A crossbow is a one-shot weapon, it and takes time to reload to get off a second shot if you miss. Absolutely the most worthless weapon to have against a pack a fecking zombies. But Slappy’s gonna run around with a crossbow because it LOOKS cool?!?! To whom?!?! The fecking zombies trying to eat his ass?!?!?!

The crossbow is in there to get the 14-year-old boys away from WoW for an hour to watch the teevee. Jeebus H. Christ! A crossbow?!?!?!?!

Mass, the whole point of the crossbow is that it’s quiet. Gunshots draw other zombies, since they know humans are afoot. The crossbow can also be used from a safer distance than using an axe or other implement to bash in a zombie’s head.

Eek. Didn’t notice it’s Jesse’s post. Sorry, Amanda.

Mass,

He uses a crossbow because it’s quiet.  The WD zombies have learned to react to gunshots like a dinner bell, so survivors avoid firing guns at all costs.

I’m still watching the show for my zombie fix but it’s getting frustrating for all the character issues people mentioned above.  There’s been a few brief moments when the show addressed some of the interesting questions about the zombies: how much intelligence do the dead retain, can they actually work together, etc., but then it’s back to stupid infighting.  And I wanted to punch that country veterinarian who insisted that hey, this is just like any other epidemic!  Sure, apart from that whole global collapse of civilization thing.

Not only that, but he can retrieve the cross bow arrow from the zombie’s head after killing it, but you can’t reuse a bullet you’ve already fired.

All zombie survival guides agree that you need a light weapon that is not dependent on ammunition.  This takes into account your fatigue in wielding it as well as the fact that bullets will eventually run out.  And apparently no one will ever figure out how to make more. 

I think I would keep watching for a while without the zombies, but the minute if they get rid of the whole Rick-Shane homoerotic element, I’m outta there.

R.T.: Try reading “Feed” and “Deadline” by Mira Grant.

The good horror and sci fi movies are coming out of Britain and France these days; look at “Shaun of the Dead” and “Attack the Block”. Unfortunately,  Steven Spielberg’s hand is in “The Walking Dead”,  “Terra Nova”, and “Falling Skies”, which means you get yapping family drama that’s not dramatic.  If you took everybody from each of those shows,  added them all together, you wouldn’t wind up with one whole interesting personality.  I’d kill for a zombie or horror movie that had real actual people in it, but when’s the last time that happened? “Twenty Eight Days Later”?

  I stuck with TWD even after that awful moment in the preview, where the two leads bitch about women for far too long.  But since then it’s just been one big stupid after another. And “Terra Nova” is punishingly boring. There’s not enough dinosaurs. There’s too much of that stupid Shannon family, none of whom have any personality whatsoever.

The dynamics of social collapse are fascinating, but nobody does that. I mean, that’s what drew me to “Fallng Skies”, only to find the saccharine sensibilities of Spielberg dominating what should have been a good story. 

What gets in all of these shows is how the women are stuck washing and cleaning and cooking. Every person should be able to handle weapons otherwise they’ll be a liability.  That’s the biggest, most glaring flaw for me.

What gets in all of these shows is how the women are stuck washing and cleaning and cooking. Every person should be able to handle weapons otherwise they’ll be a liability.  That’s the biggest, most glaring flaw for me.

What’s worse is that these shows pretend to address that issue, usually by just having the women occasionaly say, “Hey, why are we always the ones cooking and cleaning?” But they never actually challenge those gender roles.

Apocalypse shows almost always seem to feed into libertarian fantasies of brown hoards attacking strong white males, the one exception might be the resident evil series.

  They did precisely that, in exactly those words, in the first season of TWD.  It’s another reason why this show gets on my nerves.  These characters are stupid, and whiny, and they have no tactical awareness, except for Darryl,  who has an actual personality and a sharp tongue.

Also, why in hell do they keep that damned Winnebago? There’s better vehicles. Why don’t they carry ga or diesel with them? In a pinch, you can actually make diesel.  I remember thinking during the premiere, These morons better take all that water with them. But I bet they won’t. Why don’t they have water filters and water purification tablets from sporting good stores?

And above all, how come the zombies haven’t rotted away to nothing in the Atlanta heat?

What gets in all of these shows is how the women are stuck washing and cleaning and cooking. Every person should be able to handle weapons otherwise they’ll be a liability.  That’s the biggest, most glaring flaw for me.

The comic book is even worse on that front than the television series.  On the show, we see the women washing clothes while the guys are goofing off, and the women grumble about this.  In the comic book, the women cheerfully opine that it’s obviously “natural” for them to still be doing the cooking and cleaning.  Bunch of bullshit.  If you’re part of the last one percent of humanity that’s managed to stay alive, then obviously you’re going to be a fighter who can hold her own.  But almost no post-apocalyptic stories take this into consideration.

  Yeah, I actually like zombies and post apocalyptic movies,  but they’re always written by and for losers who think they’d be the big winners if everybody else died. Actively keeping guns from people in that situation is downright scary.  The women are in a real bad position in the worst of all possible situations. Adds a whole new dimension to it, doesn’t it?

I’m wondering if the passive sexism in the show “gee, of course women like doing the washing and cooking!”——explains the lack of imagination that permeates the writing.  If they’re not wiling to think outside the box with womens’ roles, then they’re so lazy they won’t bother elsewhere, will they?  It’s like having one interesting character——Daryl—-exhausts their abilities, and that’s it for creativity.

The only real zombie movie is Shaun of the Dead.

I actually loved the first season. Part of what saved it was that they actually had missions interspersed with the, ahem, “character development” and interpersonal whatnot: get the dude and his son to safety, get out of town, get into town, the thing with the department store, the CDC, and so on. The characters weren’t Tolstoy-level deep, certainly, but there was enough variety to keep it interesting. As soon as they got on the road and their only goal was to get to Fort Benning, the show became nothing but their whining, their infighting, their stupid choices, and their shitty, shitty accents. And yeah, the crappy Winebago, and the ammo rationing. Y’all spent an episode and a half in Decatur. Guns and huge SUVs outnumber citizens of Decatur three to one.

The second season has just been intolerable. I’m actually mad at my TV for showing it to me. Apparently, they lost their showrunner over the break, and the result has been a longer season, a smaller budget, and crappy plot intercut with overlong footage of shambling and prayologuing. And I’m the compassionate one in the household—when the little girl runs away and gets lost, I shouldn’t be yelling, “Just let her die! She’s a liability!”

Yeah, I watched the pilot, surmised the series was going to be shit, and then was shocked when everyone kept watching it and saying how good it was.

So, I kept checking in every once in a while. Nope, still shit.

I’m not against mindless entertainment and I love horror movies, even a good chunk of the horrendous ones. The difference I suppose is that they’re movies. An hour and a half, done; no further involvement needed on my behalf. But week after week, for seasons? Ug, no thanks.

Speaking of horror movies, for the witty side, anyone who is a fan of the Shaun of the Dead/Attack the Block type might want to check out ‘Tucker & Dale vs. Evil’, I saw it this past weekend and I thought I might pass it along because not to many have heard of it and its release schedule has been bungled beyond all comprehension. No zombies but it’s fun and has Alan Tudyk, how can you go wrong?

RT, may i suggest ZOMBIALITY: A QUEER BENT ON THE UNDEAD? It was a Lambda Literary Award nominee.

There are zombies with their own personalities, zombies who develop new personalities after reanimation, drag queen zombies who leave off eating cops to dance to Judy Garland. And all the stories are somewhere on the GLBT spectrum. My own is lesbian truck drivers.

http://www.amazon.com/Zombiality-Queer-Undead-Bill-Tucker/dp/1453729127

Or Elizabeth Donald’s THE COLD ONES and BLACKFIRE, in which zombies are a super-soldier experiment gone wrong. http://literaryunderworld.com/ (that’s the author consortium, the books are out from Sam’s Dot Publishing)

As for The Walking Dead, I’m just watching for Norman Reedus. Sometimes it gets to me, the Vatos episode made me wibble a lot, most of the time I’m just seeing where they go.  The sheer stupidity annoys me, Solar shower bags! Water filters! Solar-panel plugs for lights, or other entertainment. Have none of these people ever gone camping?! Hot water should not be more precious than gold.

(then again, I have the survival instinct of a cantaloupe in a horror movie situation, so who am I to talk?)

I didn’t get too far in the series and had a “I want to know what happens” feeling, but not all that strongly.. not enough to try and keep up with it. It just didn’t really offer anything new and interesting.

Zombies Anonymous explores the “what if all people who die become zombies?” issue, along with the “what if they retain their intelligence/personalities?” questions. The premise is a world where all the dead become zombies, and follows a young woman killed by her boyfriend. She tries to adjust (find a job where being alive is prerequisite, joins a support group, struggles against eating people) while the boyfriend is initially scared away, but goes back to obsessing over her and joins a hate group in order to more communally hate her (for being a zombie). It makes me think someone in production was a little too familiar with domestic violence/MRA-types. Which was actually a kind of scary premise. The rest of the movie goes off the rails on the eating-flesh-is-like-an-addiction narrative and sets up a whole stupid thing about a human-flesh=drugs-hippie-cult with far too long girl-girl fights and so forth. Not a winner, but the initial premise was at least interesting and different.

I don’t think you can make that material work without a lead actress as compelling as Sofie Gråbøl.

I think this is a “Yes, but”. The US surely has actresses capable of handling the material. What it doesn’t – to an outsider – seem to have is a television industry willing to let them. Putting a standard female TV-cop in a jumper doesn’t get you Sarah Lund.

There’s no more to it than these tense moments and stilted character beats. The comic it’s based on is 15 volumes of this and it’s still going.