Today's article will have to serve for Wednesday and Thursday this week. Two days of school delays followed by a full snowday have apparently just worn me out or something.
So Season 1 of AMC's The Walking Dead has wrapped up. It started on Halloween and ran for a mere six episodes. Originally, it had been planned to be a miniseries, which would have made it even shorter, but it was so clearly a winner from the get-go that they upped it to a very short season. Better still, there's a second season already heading into production, and it'll be a full(er) 13 episodes. Personally, I like real 22-episode seasons, but series on cable - The Shield, Psych, Eureka, Warehouse 13, Doctor Who, etc. - all seem to go with just thirteen. More's the pity.
A pity indeed, because the first season was awesome! If you haven't watched it yet, beware - I'm going to spoil the hell out of the first season.
The series begins with local sheriff Rick Grimes and his partner Shane heading off to intercept some fleeing criminals. Rick gets shot in the process and ends up in a coma. He's briefly lucid enough to see Shane come to visit, but when he finally wakes up for real, the world has changed. Grimes was apparently in a coma for several months, during which time we later learn some sort of unknown infection spread around the globe. The disease causes great pain, a very high fever, and then death. And anywhere from a few minutes to eight hours later, the victim's body self-animates and rises up looking for the flesh of the living. The dead walk once again.
Over the next several days, Rick struggles to understand what's happened to the world. Luckily, he meets a man named Morgan and his son Duane who, after clobbering him over the head by mistake, explain to him the basics of surviving the zombie apocalypse. Rick checks out his home and determines that his wife and son were able to get out. They're out there somewhere, and he's going to find them.
First, though, Rick manages to get himself trapped inside a tank surrounded by a few hundred walking dead. He's rescued by some folks who've come to town for supplies. It takes some work to get everyone safely out of town and back to their camp, but in a stunning display of good luck, the scavengers are from the same camp as Rick's wife and son. They're reunited, and he's even back together with his old friend Shane. Who's, ahem, been keeping Rick's wife "company" in his absence. After all, they did believe Rick had been dead for a couple of months.
It's a short-lived reunion, however. You see, one of the scavengers was a racist, redneck jerk and Rick left him handcuffed to a rooftop. He also left behind his bag 'o guns and the radio he needed to warn Morgan not to go into Atlanta. So back downtown he goes. The redneck has escaped on his own (by sawing off his own hand. That's hard-core!), but when they try to grab the bag of guns, some guys instead grab one of the band and drive off with him.
It turns out, a group of Latinos have taken over the old-folks home where their elder relatives live and fortified it against the zombies. They saw the bag of guns and they want it really badly. They're willing to trade Glenn the kidnapped pizza-guy for the weapons. Rick's having none of it, until he learns about all the old-timers who are relying on the vatos to keep them safe. He ends up splitting the guns with them before heading back to camp and his family.
They arrive just in time to help stop a massive attack by the walking dead. The survivors are almost out of food and their camp isn't safe. It's time to go. But where to? Fort Benning is in one direction, and the Centers for Disease Control is back in Atlanta. Neither's a sure bet, but since one of the survivors is infected with the zombie plague, the CDC seems like a good place to try.
Sadly, everybody abandoned the CDC - all the scientists either ran away or killed themselves. All but one guy. He's the husband of the woman who was in charge of the place, and he made a promise to her to keep searching for a cure as long as possible. In a lab accident, he destroys the samples he'd need to do his work, however, and by the time the survivors show up he's nearly out of fuel. He's also a little crazy, so he doesn't mention to them that when the CDC's generators run dry, they automatically set off an explosion to completely destroy the building and all of the infectious samples stored inside. In the final scene of the season, the group barely manages to escape the building before it erupts in a massive explosion. They're back where they started - no food, another couple of members lost, and no clear ideas about where to go. And they're in a city overrun by the walking dead.
This is the first series to seriously take on the concept of zombies. I'm not sure I entirely agree with their core approach, which is that "It's not a show about zombies. It's a show about people." I mean, on the one hand, DUH. Of course it's about people. But there are already LOTS and LOTS of shows about people. And some of the people in this show were either stock characters (the redneck, the wife-beater, etc.) or were so poorly fleshed out that we just didn't know anything about them or care. I hope that next season they find a better balance between good, strong characters and zombie-killing, post-apocalyptic action.
Still, it was a hell of a show. It was the kind of show that regularly - at least once per episode - pulled me literally to the edge of my seat in concern at what was happening. That's rare and precious in TV these days, and it made this show a must-watch for me. It also had some very interesting and likable characters when it took the time to develop them. The redneck's brother, Darryl (also a redneck) ended up being one of my absolute favorites, and I even warmed up to Dale, the old fella, once I got to know him.
Best of all, the show frequently looked like a movie. Whether the producers were flipping an old car over and over like in the first episode, or showing the characters cruising down empty Atlanta streets accompanied only by the walking dead, the show definitely had a grand feel to it. There were several scenes in the show where military positions had been overrun, with equipment still sitting idle, littered with the bodies of those who had been shot down in the attack.The explosion of the CDC building in the finale was terrific and really left you with a sense that a) the government isn't going to be much help and b) the characters were utterly without a safe haven.
I'm a huge, huge fan of The Walking Dead. I think it did far more right than wrong, and as easy as it would be to nitpick the show to death (Wait, the guy was in a coma for MONTHS and then got up and ran around??), I'd be concerned that it would rise right back up and come after me. The season combined stellar action (the attack on the survivors' camp was worth re-watching multiple times) with some tenderhearted emotion (like Morgan trying - and failing - to shoot his zombie wife and lay her to rest, or like Andrea holding her slain sister Amy all night in her arms until she comes back to life, just so Andrea could say goodbye before putting a bullet through her zombie brain. That's seriously good stuff, there.) and ended up with a show that's much better than most of what else is on television. The ratings suggest that most people agree - it was the most-watched series premier in cable history (or something like that) and continued to pull in huge numbers throughout the short season. It's available to watch through Amazon.com, and it's due out on DVD very soon. If you haven't seen it, rest assured that the spoilers above can't really dampen the visual and emotional impact of the show. I rate The Walking Dead an A and strongly recommend it.
Showing posts with label Zombies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zombies. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Monday, November 1, 2010
[TV] The Walking Dead Premier Review
Every studio and network markets their new shows as intensely as they can afford because they want them to do well. We call this "hype," and it can include everything from TV commercials to print ads to viral marketing campaigns and Internet web-content. Frank Darabont's The Walking Dead, which premiered Halloween night on AMC, had all of these. It was hyped to the max. It had commercials, print-ads, preview trailers, a whole slew of content on the website (including a 17-minute-long "behind the scenes" preview), and the marketing gurus even arranged for "zombie invasions" at various cities around the country (around the world?), with actors made up like zombies staggering around to draw attention to the show.
Hype tends to be a good thing - if you do a good job of hyping the show, people are more likely to watch it. There's a danger, however. If the show doesn't live up to the hype, the backlash can be extreme. You can be a hit one week, and an utter bomb forever after. If you're going to get the Internet-savvy geeks to rally their less zombie-educated friends to tune in and watch the premiere, it had damn well better fire on all cylinders, or those same geeks will rip you to shreds all over the Internet, and your show will die a slow and grizzly death.
Let me be very frank and clear about The Walking Dead - there is categorically NO chance of that happening. The Walking Dead stepped up and earned every word of enthusiasm and excitement generated before the premier aired. Mild spoilers follow:
The Walking Dead tells the story of Rick Grimes, a deputy sheriff outside Atlanta, Georgia. He's having a typical day on patrol with his partner, Shane Walsh, when he gets shot during a shootout and lands in the hospital. He wakes up some days later and the place is deserted. He's weak, dehydrated, and the hospital is a shambles. He staggers outside and finds the parking lot lined with dead bodies wrapped in sheets. Hundreds of them. He's baffled.
He staggers home through deserted streets, but his beloved wife Lori and his son Carl are gone. A neighbor's house has become the temporary home of Morgan and his son Duane. They're suspicious of Rick at first, but when he convinces them that his wounds are simple gunshots, they take him in and explain what's going on. There's a disease. It gives you a high fever and you die. Then you get back up and you want to feed on the living. Morgan's own wife had died and risen right there, and they hadn't had the heart to leave as she wanders around outside their little bunker.
Rick, Morgan and Duane head over to the sheriff's office, clean up, grab some guns, and then part ways. Morgan and Duane head back to their bunker for some "target practice." In truth, Morgan goes to an upstairs bedroom and starts shooting zombies from the window, hoping to summon - and put down - his own wife. It's a heart-wrenching scene as he looks at the woman he loves through the scope and struggles to pull the trigger.
Rick, meanwhile, hopes to find his family safe and sound at an Atlanta refugee shelter. The emergency broadcasts had told everyone to go there, where they'd find food, shelter, and military protection. When his squad car runs out of gas, Rick partners with a horse from a nearby farm and rides into the barren wasteland that Atlanta has become. The place is deserted... except for the enormous mob of zombies he encounters around one streetcorner. They lumber after him, drag him off the horse, and attack the poor beast as Frank scrambles to escape. His only hope - a tank that's been abandoned nearby. He's dropped his bag of guns, and all he has is his revolver. The premier episode ends with his frantic battle to make it into the tank and its armored - if temporary - safety.
Everything was done well in this Comic Book-turned-series. The characters are believable and likable. You want them to survive, which is vital. If we wanted the zombies to win, the show wouldn't work at all. The zombies, also, are perfectly frightening in their mindless hunger, their torn, rotten flesh. The settings - of buildings and familiar-seeming places damaged in pitched battle against the undead and then abandoned because there's nobody left alive, and untainted, to occupy them - are spot-on perfect to build atmosphere. And that atmosphere is chilling, desperate, and tense. The scenes involving Morgan's wife were at once touching and frightening - especially the scene where she approaches the front door of their house and peers in the peep-hole.
If you missed the premier of The Walking Dead, it appears to be on umpteen more times on AMC, so tune in to one of them and watch it. If that doesn't work for you, you can buy each episode through Amazon.com's video on demand, though the first one isn't up yet so I can't tell how much it'll cost. Whatever it is, it's likely worth it. This is a terrific opening to what I hope will be an outstanding series. I highly recommend it.
Hype tends to be a good thing - if you do a good job of hyping the show, people are more likely to watch it. There's a danger, however. If the show doesn't live up to the hype, the backlash can be extreme. You can be a hit one week, and an utter bomb forever after. If you're going to get the Internet-savvy geeks to rally their less zombie-educated friends to tune in and watch the premiere, it had damn well better fire on all cylinders, or those same geeks will rip you to shreds all over the Internet, and your show will die a slow and grizzly death.
Let me be very frank and clear about The Walking Dead - there is categorically NO chance of that happening. The Walking Dead stepped up and earned every word of enthusiasm and excitement generated before the premier aired. Mild spoilers follow:
The Walking Dead tells the story of Rick Grimes, a deputy sheriff outside Atlanta, Georgia. He's having a typical day on patrol with his partner, Shane Walsh, when he gets shot during a shootout and lands in the hospital. He wakes up some days later and the place is deserted. He's weak, dehydrated, and the hospital is a shambles. He staggers outside and finds the parking lot lined with dead bodies wrapped in sheets. Hundreds of them. He's baffled.
He staggers home through deserted streets, but his beloved wife Lori and his son Carl are gone. A neighbor's house has become the temporary home of Morgan and his son Duane. They're suspicious of Rick at first, but when he convinces them that his wounds are simple gunshots, they take him in and explain what's going on. There's a disease. It gives you a high fever and you die. Then you get back up and you want to feed on the living. Morgan's own wife had died and risen right there, and they hadn't had the heart to leave as she wanders around outside their little bunker.
Rick, Morgan and Duane head over to the sheriff's office, clean up, grab some guns, and then part ways. Morgan and Duane head back to their bunker for some "target practice." In truth, Morgan goes to an upstairs bedroom and starts shooting zombies from the window, hoping to summon - and put down - his own wife. It's a heart-wrenching scene as he looks at the woman he loves through the scope and struggles to pull the trigger.
Rick, meanwhile, hopes to find his family safe and sound at an Atlanta refugee shelter. The emergency broadcasts had told everyone to go there, where they'd find food, shelter, and military protection. When his squad car runs out of gas, Rick partners with a horse from a nearby farm and rides into the barren wasteland that Atlanta has become. The place is deserted... except for the enormous mob of zombies he encounters around one streetcorner. They lumber after him, drag him off the horse, and attack the poor beast as Frank scrambles to escape. His only hope - a tank that's been abandoned nearby. He's dropped his bag of guns, and all he has is his revolver. The premier episode ends with his frantic battle to make it into the tank and its armored - if temporary - safety.
Everything was done well in this Comic Book-turned-series. The characters are believable and likable. You want them to survive, which is vital. If we wanted the zombies to win, the show wouldn't work at all. The zombies, also, are perfectly frightening in their mindless hunger, their torn, rotten flesh. The settings - of buildings and familiar-seeming places damaged in pitched battle against the undead and then abandoned because there's nobody left alive, and untainted, to occupy them - are spot-on perfect to build atmosphere. And that atmosphere is chilling, desperate, and tense. The scenes involving Morgan's wife were at once touching and frightening - especially the scene where she approaches the front door of their house and peers in the peep-hole.
If you missed the premier of The Walking Dead, it appears to be on umpteen more times on AMC, so tune in to one of them and watch it. If that doesn't work for you, you can buy each episode through Amazon.com's video on demand, though the first one isn't up yet so I can't tell how much it'll cost. Whatever it is, it's likely worth it. This is a terrific opening to what I hope will be an outstanding series. I highly recommend it.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
[TV] The Walking Dead
Let this serve as your official reminder that Frank Darabont's The Walking Dead premieres on AMC this Sunday night, Halloween, at 10 PM.
I'm very excited to see this show. I wouldn't call myself a huge horror fan, but certain classic concepts really work for me and the Zombie Apocalypse is one of them. Horror hasn't been especially well-represented on television over the years, and zombie-horror even less so.
This particular show is based on the comic books of the same name. I never read it, but I've seen the enthusiasm online and I've watched the previews for myself and I'm sold.
The zombie mythology hits on several common themes and human fears. One is fear of death and the unknown nature of life and death. What makes a person alive? What makes them dead? If we don't truly understand that, then how can we be sure that the dead will stay that way?
And, of course, dead things are scary. We don't want to end up like them, and that's part of it, but there's a certain primal fear of corpses, especially a fear that the corpse will open its eyes and rise up in search of revenge or blood or whatever it is you really, really crave when it's late and you're dead and you haven't had dinner.
Also, we fear the apocalypse - the destruction of our civilization and the massive loss of life that would ensue because of catastrophe, war, or famine. We've got it pretty good, and the notion of having to survive among the ruins without all of our luxuries and our laws - having to scrabble for the remnants of the past while fighting off the strong who would prey on the weak - that's scary stuff.
Finally, the zombie apocalypse speaks to our fear of plague. Our terror of an unknown pathogen spreading from one person to the next - effectively turning our close-knit society against us - invisible, undetectable, and horrifically fatal. And zombie-ism is the worst. As bad as pus-filled blisters, wracking coughs and flesh-eating bacteria may be, they pale in comparison to rising up from the dead to hunger for the flesh and brains of your friends and family.
George Romero is the undisputed father of the modern zombie genre, beginning with his original 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. I have to confess, I watched the original B&W film and I wasn't really taken by it. I thought the story and acting were just okay, but compared to, for example, Planet of the Apes, which came out the same year? I just wasn't impressed. If I were a better scholar of motion pictures, I might recognize something about the story, the camerawork, the acting or the music that somehow catapult it to legendary status, but I'm not so I don't.
In recent years, however, the zombie genre has exploded (some would say it's been saturated) with some fantastic works. On the big screen, movies like 28 Days Later and The Crazies (also based on a Romero classic) put zombies right into modern-day cities and let us scramble in fear alongside the poor survivors who had to somehow, against the odds, escape their predations. In books, we've got Max Brooks' truly excellent World War Z, and the clever faux-classic Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And in video games, we've got games like Left for Dead, among a slew of others. And in song, of course, there's the absolutely outstanding re: Your Brains by Jonathan Coulton.
That's a whole lot of brain-eating going on! Fast zombies, slow zombies, business zombies - they're all well-represented. But none of them have been on television. Until now. The zombie apocalypse is coming, people. Consider this new AMC series to be part of your survival training, and be sure to tune in Sunday night.
I'm very excited to see this show. I wouldn't call myself a huge horror fan, but certain classic concepts really work for me and the Zombie Apocalypse is one of them. Horror hasn't been especially well-represented on television over the years, and zombie-horror even less so.
This particular show is based on the comic books of the same name. I never read it, but I've seen the enthusiasm online and I've watched the previews for myself and I'm sold.
The zombie mythology hits on several common themes and human fears. One is fear of death and the unknown nature of life and death. What makes a person alive? What makes them dead? If we don't truly understand that, then how can we be sure that the dead will stay that way?
And, of course, dead things are scary. We don't want to end up like them, and that's part of it, but there's a certain primal fear of corpses, especially a fear that the corpse will open its eyes and rise up in search of revenge or blood or whatever it is you really, really crave when it's late and you're dead and you haven't had dinner.
Also, we fear the apocalypse - the destruction of our civilization and the massive loss of life that would ensue because of catastrophe, war, or famine. We've got it pretty good, and the notion of having to survive among the ruins without all of our luxuries and our laws - having to scrabble for the remnants of the past while fighting off the strong who would prey on the weak - that's scary stuff.
Finally, the zombie apocalypse speaks to our fear of plague. Our terror of an unknown pathogen spreading from one person to the next - effectively turning our close-knit society against us - invisible, undetectable, and horrifically fatal. And zombie-ism is the worst. As bad as pus-filled blisters, wracking coughs and flesh-eating bacteria may be, they pale in comparison to rising up from the dead to hunger for the flesh and brains of your friends and family.
George Romero is the undisputed father of the modern zombie genre, beginning with his original 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. I have to confess, I watched the original B&W film and I wasn't really taken by it. I thought the story and acting were just okay, but compared to, for example, Planet of the Apes, which came out the same year? I just wasn't impressed. If I were a better scholar of motion pictures, I might recognize something about the story, the camerawork, the acting or the music that somehow catapult it to legendary status, but I'm not so I don't.
In recent years, however, the zombie genre has exploded (some would say it's been saturated) with some fantastic works. On the big screen, movies like 28 Days Later and The Crazies (also based on a Romero classic) put zombies right into modern-day cities and let us scramble in fear alongside the poor survivors who had to somehow, against the odds, escape their predations. In books, we've got Max Brooks' truly excellent World War Z, and the clever faux-classic Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And in video games, we've got games like Left for Dead, among a slew of others. And in song, of course, there's the absolutely outstanding re: Your Brains by Jonathan Coulton.
That's a whole lot of brain-eating going on! Fast zombies, slow zombies, business zombies - they're all well-represented. But none of them have been on television. Until now. The zombie apocalypse is coming, people. Consider this new AMC series to be part of your survival training, and be sure to tune in Sunday night.
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