A lengthy roundtable deep dive into The Walking Dead, from the TV Geek Army archives.
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
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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 cliched 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.
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Last week’s episode was near-perfect; this one was less so, but was still very well-done. I think the difference is because of two factors: 1) it was a half hour shorter and felt a little rushed because 2) it had a lot more characters to introduce us to in that smaller time-frame.
That meant we were given as much action, but much less of the quiet times that made the first episode so haunting — the single, haunting zombie in the grass, the one-on-one conversations, the scene where Morgan had to try to kill his zombie-fied wife, Rick by himself in the wreckage of everything he knew — these were the strongest moments of the pilot, and there wasn’t time to linger much in the second episode.
Andrea and Rick’s conversation in the jewelry store almost got there, but we didn’t have much time to get to know Andrea or that the blonde from the camp was the sister she was talking about. Was that mentioned before? I must have missed it because of all the zombies. I missed the pace and the personal tone of the pilot, but I wasn’t sorry that the episode was all action.
So much was brought up that will enrich the rest of the season: Glenn is an under-appreciated logistics man, Shane and Lori have some sort of sordid thing going on but she still cares for Rick, Shane’s kind of a jerk in a potentially violent way, the survivors have a camp, make forays into the city, and have learned how to survive, T-Dog is kind of a hysterical coward when it comes right down to it, Merle is severely pissed and that will likely come back to haunt them.
The zombies aren’t exactly smarter than they are in other zombie movies (and this show is more of an extended movie than a regular show, so far), but they’re not only reanimated corpses — they can smell out the living, they aren’t entirely taken in by disguises, they look… creepily aware when they’re hunting. And they’re fast. Combined with the lingering bits of old personalities that they showed in the pilot, this could get really tense and really emotionally murky before the end.
This episode had the obligatory ‘we have to stick together’ scene, which was to be expected, but what was much more affecting was the scene where they took the zombie as camouflage and paused to point out that he was once a person. Not that old a person, either. And then that pause was counterpointed by a really gross scene with an axe. I think the sound effects guys and the foley artists are having way too much fun here, but the grossness was that much grosser because he wasn’t just a Walker, he was once an unfortunate person, and that’s what they were going for.
In the final show-down, they picked the best car to make into a noise-maker: flashy, loud, and also really fast. It was brilliant and exciting and I’m glad Glenn got away — I thought maybe he wouldn’t — but I hope he had a way to turn that thing off before he had to stop somewhere. Overall, successful, if not as together as the previous episode, and just as pervaded by the crawling creepies as the first episode: even when nothing bad was happening, there was always that expectation that something horrible would come at any moment. And they’re building up a nice juxtaposition between human monstrosity and actual monster monstrosity that should drive the rest of the series quite nicely.
What did you all think of it?
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Episode Five! The (mostly) calm before the storm that the last episode is going to have to be. They bury their dead because they’re still alive. Jim makes a tough choice. A family leaves the group. Morgan still hasn’t shown up. And then everyone goes to the CDC, where it looks like only one scientist is left, and he’s probably more than a little nutso.
This episode wasn’t as affecting as the last one, but it was probably more necessary for the series: this is where they decide to do something about their situation, where they take a risk. And it’s where they decide to stop breaking up which means they’re taking the kids into the middle of all this crazy. We haven’t seen so many dead bodies since the first episode, and it sort of serves as bookends for the season, if a little early.
It’s been almost a third of a year since all this happened, and that makes it just that much more amazing that everyone has made it this far, and that much more horrifying that the scientist has been holed up this long, mostly alone. And that’s an awesome set-up for the last episode of this short first season.
I hate to harp on about it, but there were so many beautifully slow moments, where we are given tons of time to see how these events are affecting these people, and how each of them is taking it differently and in different directions. But they all have a common goal and like it or not (and it seems most of the time they don’t like it), they have to stick together.
The best moment this week, I think, was almost at the end when Rick knew there was someone inside the CDC fortress and finally sort of snapped a little. He’s been so determined, so focused, that he was almost unreal while everyone else around him was getting more real with all their flaws. But this week, he’s doubting himself a little, he’s admitting that he’s got almost nothing to his name, and he screams at the camera like a mad man. And it seems it was enough. The scene where the door opens and the light shines out like some sort of magical portal to salvation was very well handled, and is of course likely just another calm before the storm. All that light, all that screaming, that’s got to have caught the attention of the walkers.
What will happen next episode? I won’t even hazard a guess beyond what the preview showed us (they have their blood taken, Andrea gets sick). Anything could happen at this point, and I’ve rarely been so happy not to know what’s going to come next!
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Hello all,
A bit of business before I jump into my thoughts on the episode. Word came in last night that AMC has renewed The Walking Dead for a second season. Given the show’s ratings record shattering premiere, this is about as surprising as the news that broke at about the same time regarding the Dallas Cowboys firing head coach Wade Phillips.
I know I’m probably going to catch a fair amount of flack for saying this, but I don’t want to beat around any bushes so I’m just going to come right out with it; I wasn’t really a big fan of “Guts.” The episode wasn’t bad, per se, and it certainly had its moments, but something about it rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe I was just distracted by Michael Rooker (I kept waiting for someone to try to give him a zombie “stinkpalm”), who I can’t see in any role without picturing him licking chocolate and dingleberries off his fingers.
The episode started off strong, with a pretty racy sex scene between Shane and Lori during which Lori stares at her wedding ring but decides to keep going. After this, however, the tone of the episode shifts noticeably. The horror genre has always been known for being “campy” (which is not necessarily a bad thing), but for the most part “Days Gone Bye” avoided campiness. Not so in “Guts” (hell, even the episode title is a little campy).
While the first episode relied more on the use of the “less is more” philosophy to scare the viewer, episode two was full of loud cars and gross-out gags. Again, this isn’t to say that I am always against the smearing of zombie guts and the revving of engines, I just mean that scenes like that didn’t really jive with the mood the first episode seemed to establish. Here’s an example that I think sums up the difference between the two episodes pretty succinctly; in episode one Morgan refers to the zombies as “walkers” which is cool and subtle, in episode two the survivors refer to them as “geeks” which is cheesy and a bit over-the-top.
The new characters that we meet this week didn’t really help me take the episode seriously. I know that The Walking Dead is a comic book adaptation, and it definitely seems like a lot of new survivors are comic book characters or cartoons, not real people. Beyond that, some of them came off as lazy racial stereotypes.
I blame this partially on the wardrobe department. Glenn was wearing a logo-less baseball hat and jersey. No one wears jerseys without team names or logos on them. T-Dog was wearing a shirt that just said “Brooklyn” on it. Were all of the “Harlem World” shirts sold-out? Couldn’t find any Platinum Fubu? And are you serious, the character’s name is T-Dog? That’s worse than U-Turn, and U-Turn was meant to be a joke!
Back to Glenn for a second, and then I promise I’ll stop bitching. I don’t know what it was (maybe it was the baseball hat) but I couldn’t shake the “teenage Short Round” vibe I was getting from him. I couldn’t be the only one that thought this, right? I just kept waiting for him to drop a “No time for love, Dr. Jones.”
There were things, aside from the sex scene, in the episode that I liked. It’s cool that Shane’s group on the outskirts of town is really an extension of the group of survivors that Rick meets in Atlanta. I appreciate the way that the show let the audience in on that without Rick being aware of it yet. But, again, I was more distracted by the campiness of it all to really enjoy it. Here’s hoping next week is a little more like the premiere.
Nice moves, Clint Eastwood!
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Hey there Mike, Samantha, and Lucas,
I was a little surprised that some of you were a bit disappointed with “Guts.” Admittedly the 90-minute pilot hooked me so deeply and well that it would have taken quite a lot to shake my confidence in the show, but I felt that the follow up effort did a great job in introducing a large new set of characters, broadening our understanding of what’s going on in the United States of Zombies, and most importantly kept the intensity level frightfully high.
That said, I understand some of the quibbles. Lucas, I was particularly impressed with your calling out the no frills costumes (which really does make Glenn look like Jonathan Ke Quan just returned from Goonies island) and not-so-spot on character names. And I get too that the racial tensions embodied by Michael Rooker’s as yet one dimensional meth-snorting a-hole character isn’t the most riveting thing about the show by far, though I would say that it goes a long way in showcasing that the remaining live humans on the planet are not going to get along harmoniously just because the zombie hordes have wiped out much of culture, society, and rules that used to exist.
While the gut-smearing stuff was certainly gross, I thought it was a pretty nifty plot device and I admired how far the direction went in “going there.” But where “Guts” goes to the next level is the full sequence in which Rick and Glenn must pass through a busy street full o’ zombies to reach an escape vehicle. I was wearing a zip up sweater, and realized that while watching the scene that I had unconsciously zipped the sweater up so that it was covering my mouth. I knew the rain was going to wash away the guts enough so that the zombies would “sniff” them out, I knew that there would be a mad scramble, and I knew it was nearly certain that Rick would make it at the least (Glenn, as a new character on a relatively new show, could have easily gotten snacked on up for all we knew), but I was still riveted and creeped out and scared all at once (and how awesome was the makeup, costumes, and acting of some of the zombies checking out our live heroes?).
I actually may be in the minority in thinking that things slowed down quite a bit when the action shifted to the rural campsite. But no doubt there will be plenty of payoff when our urban exiles return.
The preview for next week’s episode shows Merle’s kin all up in arms because there man was left on a rooftop by T-Dog. I don’t think that we saw any of those guys during the first two episodes, which might have been nice to help better set up the upcoming conflict on that front. Just a thought.
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I’ve said before that The Walking Dead is best when it’s small, intimate, personal — and “Vatos” proves the point.
Most of the episode was quiet, just people reacting to what’s happened the previous three episodes. It was all very tense, of course, as every episode of this show is very tense, but better than that there was the hinted glimmer that there’s something good left in the world. The vatos were probably murderously tough, but they were also taking care of all the seniors who had been abandoned and somehow weren’t overrun: that’s a goodness. It’s not just Rick and the still not returned Morgan. There are people trying to not just survive, but to help each other. And it was an unexpected way for the conflict to have been resolved. I fully expected them to have to shoot their wayin and then out again, like most of the rest of the conflicts we’ve seen so far, but the writers proved to be smart enough to come up with another way that the characters didn’t see coming but makes perfect sense when we get there.
None of this is to say that there was anything less horrific about this episode. Jim is cracking up slowly. Merle is on the loose, probably crazier than ever. And, whether by design or by accident, the walkers have found the camp. Their almost-home isn’t nearly as safe as they thought it would be.
This is where it gets personal again. Amy goes down, and Andrea misses the rest of the battle trying to save her. There’s that long reaction shot where we can see exactly what it means that she’s lost the only family she has left — and we know that someone killed by zombie-bite isn’t really dead dead, and they’ll have to deal with that, too.
The Walking Dead continues to be relentless. You can never let your guard down, much the way the people living in it can’t, because then something horrible happens. Something horrible is already happening. A lot of this show reads as a post-apocalyptic piece: the scavenging through the wreckage, the attempts to get things going again, the need for survival balancing out any other needs, but in reality, this is a during-apocalypse story. This particular apocalypse is still going on, and these people have to live through it because there’s no other choice. Whatever has already happened will either drive them forward like it does with Rick, or it will undo them entirely, like it’s doing to Jim. The multifacetedness of the continued unraveling of our world is amazing.
Here’s a new best part of the show: nothing is trivial. All anyone has in this world is what they brought with them when they left their previous lives, and the tiniest things — an inhaler, wrapping paper, toilet paper, school for the kids, all of it means you’re still alive and all of it can be taken at any moment. Those who don’t pull together are the first to go down.
Although it was really gratifying to see Ed get the first bite.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.