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The Walking Dead

Grand-scale action scenes, grisly violence, thrills, and haunting moments -The Walking Dead is unlike anything else on the box.

“Braiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiins…….”

Who doesn’t love a good zombie movie? Ghoulish action, bloody stunts, suspense and terror. It’s a perfect Saturday night popcorn flick. But a TV series?

Is there really enough in the genre to sustain episodic television?

It all depends on the writing and the execution (pun intended) and in FX’s The Walking Dead, Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Majestic) is both writer and director.

This US series based on graphic novels by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard is itself fairly graphic. But it needs to be if it’s to be faithful to the genre, as defined by the films of George A. Romero. Audiences expect a splattering of blood, gizzards and entrails and there’s plenty of it here.

The Walking Dead opens after the fact. In a small town in Georgia Sheriff’s deputy Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) is looking for gas. He is surrounded by abandoned and overturned cars, a desolate town, where some sort of frenzy has since subsided. He is almost alone but for one little girl walking away from him. When he calls out to her she turns around and we see he disintegrated, bleeding skull. She is the first “walker” -the living dead which inhabits this new America.

It isn’t long before Grimes sees more mutant corpses laying strewn on the grass. They are sluggish, menacing, emaciated. But like all zombies they have strength in numbers and dammit they just don’t quit. Nothing but a bullet to the skill or a heavy baseball bat bashing will take these mothers down. The Walking Dead offers plenty of bloody violence, complete with grisly sound effects.

Grimes is in search of his family, a sense of security in this apocalyptic world. Barren shots of abandoned highways and looted buildings rail against the sky likes images from The Day After and 28 Days Later. But there are clusters of survivors including a father and son held up in a family home. They pool their knowledge, shoot a few more zombies and Grimes settles on the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta as his destination.

With a horse as his transport and a rifle slung across his back he takes off for the metropolis like a cowboy of the undead.

There are two other principal groups of survivors: one is hiding on in a rural camp (the cast includes Prison Break‘s Sarah Wayne Callies) and urban dwellers hiding in a city building. The latter comprises several ethnic groups, and with a reference to working together against a common enemy we come to understand the metaphors at work here.

As episodic television The Walking Dead is highly cinematic. Grand-scale action scenes and vast landscapes, drained of rich colours, lift this beyond pedestrian storytelling. Use of music is spartan, creating moments of stark stillness. While The Walking Dead delivers in the thrills, there are also poignant, haunting moments.

It has taken an eternity for this series to reach Australian screens -twice voted by TV Tonight readers as the “international show we need to see on screen.” By now so many fans of the genre have probably seen the first series. The (re)launch of FX in Australia will see double episodes screen, and as there were only 6 episodes in Season One, we should catch up to Season Two (which will follow immediately after) fairly quickly.

Darabont has since left the series, following reports of budget cuts and disagreements with executives. All the more reason to watch his earlier, bold work. Because you won’t see anything else on the box like this.

The Walking Dead previews 8:30pm Sunday February 26th, and premieres 8:30pm Tuesday February 28th on FX.

11 Responses

  1. Shows like this need to establish a goal early on that says “we are going there” and then proceed to go there. Season 01 was OK, but Season 02 see’s the group wandering the roads, then coming to a complete stop for several epiosodes. (With lots of heavy religious content). And me as a viewer hitting the FF button waiting for something to happen. Apparantly it’s been renewed for a Season 03 which will probably be it’s last. Zombies or space aliens or post WW4, characters just wandering around becomes dull after a while.

  2. I gave up on this show in early season 2. The writing is generally horrible and inconsistent, the characters annoying, and the plotting idiot and plodding at most times. Fans stick with it like a bad relationship; like Heroes.

  3. As much as I do enjoy the show, and have seen every episode, it is no where near being an upper echelon drama like Breaking Bad or Homeland. The pilot is fantastic, but the fest of the first season does not come close to staying at that level, nor does the second season

    Everything with zombies is well done, as are the action and suspense parts of the show. But the dialogue is often simply awful, there are always plot holes, the characters constantly say and do stupid things that are only servicing the plot. That is one thing that TWD has completely wrong, as a writer you are told that in good drama, the characters should be what drives the plot, here the plot is what defines the characters. Also there is a token black character named….T Dog, he is only there because he is black, the writers seem to often forget he even exists.

    In saying that, the show is almost always entertaining, and has the potential to be great, but at the moment it ranges form B- to B+.

  4. Haven’t gotten around to watching this yet and don’t have PayTV, so it’s a bit annoying that it’s taken so long to be shown here as it will delay it on FTA even more (if at all). DVDs might be the go.

  5. I’d give the pilot 5 stars as it was incredible, but nothing else in the first season deserves even 3 stars. Season 2 is much improved though, but still not near the standard that the pilot episode set.

  6. Certainly a great show and a long wait for Oz audiences. There are quite a few You Tube features about the excellent zombie makeup techniques and putting the extras through ‘zombie school’ that are well worth a look.

  7. The Walking Dead is amazing. Easily 5 stars. Great show, the best show to come along in a long time. But why the hell has it taken so long to air here? It’s ridiculous. The mid-season finale of s2 is the biggest shock moment. And only 4 eps left so should be a big finale.

  8. Even though it is a great show I think you’re being a bit generous in giving it 5 stars. It falls away a bit towards the end of Season 1 (which is only 6 episodes) but Season 2 so far has been excellent.

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