Undead and Loving It: How Did AMC’s Flagship Show Suddenly Get So Good? (The Walking Dead)
I long felt that The Walking Dead punished its critics the same way its bedraggled heroes dispatched ravenous zombies: by stabbing them in the brain. The show was noisy, violent, and unrelentingly dumb. Which wasn’t itself a problem: There are worse ways to spend Sunday night than watching meatheads attack each other. What frustrated me most about the first four seasons of The Walking Dead was the way it squandered its unique potential. No series in the history of television has ever been as malleable as this. Because of its setting — a dystopian hellscape ravaged by flesh-eating monsters — The Walking Dead was capable of making wholesale changes in the time it takes most shows to clear their throats. Why? Because its characters existed in a dystopian hellscape ravaged by flesh-eating monsters. There were no dead ends, only open, undead mouths. So the fact that we were stuck with milquetoast dum-dums like Shane, Dale, and Andrea as long as we were was infuriating. These characters should have been buying the farm years ago. Instead, they were camped out on one.
Not that the audience seemed to care. As the corpses piled up, so did the viewers. The Walking Dead is the most popular show on television among the coveted 18-to-49-year-old demographic, and it’s not even close. (As Vulture’s Joe Adalian tweeted yesterday, the demo rating for this week’s episode, a lusty 7.2, is greater than the combined total of the four broadcast networks’ programming for the night.) For a while, I argued that this ratings dominance ought to make AMC more committed to improving its signature product. Successful shows have flexibility that struggling series only dream about. As long as The Walking Dead larded each hour with a few gruesome kills and a half-dozen instances of that rotting-melon squish sound, it was free to Trojan-horse all manner of strangeness into the proceedings. But it didn’t and no one seemed to care. So I took a cue from T-Dog (RIP!), shut my trap, and retreated to the background. The Walking Dead didn’t need to be good. And I didn’t need to keep complaining about it.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the glue factory. The show that returned for its fifth season last month isn’t just improved, it’s taken a wildly unexpected turn toward being great. At first, I wondered if my time away had simply mellowed me. After all, it’s far easier, not to mention more pleasurable, to watch a show for what it is rather than what it isn’t. And a summer spent slogging through the amateurish splatter of The Strain made me newly appreciative of the essential competence of The Walking Dead. (A good makeup team can mean the difference between Hollywood and Ed Wood.) But thanks to the canny efforts of third showrunner Scott M. Gimple, The Walking Dead’s improvements are more than just cosmetic. For the first time in its wildly successful existence, the show is using brains for more than just dinner. Here’s how The Walking Dead has gotten smarter.
(SNIP)
I still hate gore for gore’s sake and can’t quite believe that we, as a country, are 1,000 percent OK with our signature Sunday-night show featuring one dude eating another dude like a novelty drumstick while the second dude watches. But all shows deserve the right to be the best version of themselves that they can be. The difference between The Walking Dead today and the show it once was is that it now appears capable of making an artistic case for its demented choices. In this leaner, unquestionably meaner incarnation, The Walking Dead has become a show not about life or death, but about hunger. Of all the basic instincts that make us human — the need for shelter and companionship, for laughter and the occasional lollipop — hunger is the most primal and the least forgiving. Hunger is what we share with the fiercest animals and, when left to fester, it’s what can easily lower us to their level. As humans become even more of an existential threat to our lead characters than zombies, the question The Walking Dead poses is no longer “Can we survive?” It’s: “How much of ourselves will we have to sacrifice along the way?” Living is always preferable to dying. But it’s also a whole hell of a lot harder.
Much more here: http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/amc-walking-dead-season-five-review/
Good read. Andy Greenwald can veer off into pretentiousness while critiquing TV shows, but he makes some really good points in this article.
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