ESSAY: The Zombie Show - On the Post-Apoc, Post-Narrative "The Walking Dead"

[NOTE: The following commentary offers spoilers for all seasons of The Walking Dead as well as the first 13 trade paperbacks (through issue #66).]

Why the hell are we all watching The Walking Dead?

Because it's a fun show.  Because it's a fun show to hate.  Because it's so gory.  Because it's so bleak.  So shocking.  So stupid.  Because that fucking kid is never where he's supposed to be.  Because the show wears its heart on its sleeve, right next to the dislodged trachea and suppurating neck wound.  Because that guy with the crossbow shoots it and it goes SHWUCK right into a zombie's eye.  Because oh my God I can't believe that character just got the top of her head blasted off.

Five million people watched the pilot.  That number more than tripled by the time Season Five premiered.  Like a zombie horde shuffling through Atlanta, the numbers grow.  Whether intentionally or ironically, people tune in, and the simplest answer, the only one that approaches the truth behind the viewership, is a meaningless tautology: people are entertained by The Walking Dead because The Walking Dead entertains them.

Still, why?

I watched the first season.  The slow-burn pleasures of the fantastic pilot quickly gave way to dull red herring stories (a benign gang of Mexicans, a CDC sanctuary that offered one useful piece of information) and a tedious love triangle.  Andrew Lincoln's Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) offered the same tortured wet-blanket heroisms of Jack Shepherd on Lost.  So I stopped watching.  Friends told me the second season was better.

(source: The Walking Dead, "Pretty Much Dead Already")

I watched the second season.  The heroes lowered the sole black survivor into a water well contaminated by a zombie.  The sociopathy of Shane (John Bernthal) felt contrived, unconvincing, a weak stab at "developing character."  Someone offered the hopeful line, "He talked about the deer."  Characters like Andrea (Laurie Holden) and Dale (Jeffrey DeMunn) alternated between sympathetic and insufferably self-righteous.  So I stopped watching.  Friends told me the third season was better.

I watched the third season.

And it's here that it helps to go back to the beginning of this whole damn mess.

When AMC announced the show back in January of 2010, the premise sounded like a horror fan's wet dream.  A show based on a neverending zombie apocalypse?  Developed by Frank Darabont of The Shawshank Redemption?  Overseen by Gale Anne Hurd of the Terminator films?  The news was so exciting that I power-walked to Comic Blast and bought the first 11 trade paperbacks.

(source: Weekly Comic Review)

As I read the comics, my excitement moved into confusion before settling in a strange land of bewildered frustration.  The comic, created by Robert Kirkman, offered plenty of zombie carnage, plenty of melodramatics.  But precious little story.  The characters wandered from predicament to predicament in a post-apoc riff on The Odyssey, always heading for the mirage of a safe haven, always ending up back where they started, on the road, minus one or two sad bastard victims.  There was no pretense of a larger goal, and the sole constant (the testing of hero cop turned savage leader Rick Grimes) never engaged.

While some might consider this lack of narrative thrust bold, I found it a fundamentally unwise idea.  Partly because most of my comic-reading experience was with "stand-alone" stories.  The Walking Dead felt lightweight and unformed next to "books" like Watchmen, Batman: The Long Halloween, and Hellboy: Seed of Destruction.  In these stories, there was introduction, escalation, climactic action, and in the best of them, story movement directed by characters - the people called the shots, not the plot around them.  In fairness, these are the exceptions, as most comics are week-by-week affairs with no ultimate destination (I also have little patience for TV procedurals).

However, what those self-contained comics also offered was a variability in tone.  Watchmen switched attention from the pitch-black humor of anti-hero Rorschach to the time-spliced ruminations of Dr. Manhattan.  Hellboy creator Mike Mignola's great masterstroke was creating a world of folklore and superstition and centering it on a disaffected hero who offers flip commentary and punches problems away with his cannon-sized fist.  By comparison, The Walking Dead offered dour character after dour character, most hollowed into husks by their zombapocalyptic wasteland.  As Rick (and Kirkman) so astutely observed, they were the walking dead.

(source: The Walking Dead, "Arrow on the Doorpost")

There was a highlight amid all the wandering and bickering and uniformly talky cast: a substantial story arc surrounding a prison.  It was in this "mini-arc," with the heroes securing, defending, and ultimately escaping a besieged stronghold, that the series found its best long-form premise and its best villain in the maniacal Governor.  His boundless appetite for destruction (and severed zombie heads (and rape)) steered the comic into Mad Max mode; one gloriously absurd splash page featured the Governor, an eyepatched Jesus-haired lunatic, kneeling atop a tank, finger pointed at the series' heroes, shouting "KILL THEM ALL!"

Then that storyline ended, and the comic returned to its wandering style, heroes roaming from one random survivalist altercation to another.  Here's a zombie.  Here's a cannibal.  Here's a zombie.  Rinse wash repeat.

It was after seeing two people very close to Rick Grimes die violently that I realized Kirkman had one useful tool in his writer's toolbox: an inerrant talent for murdering likeable characters in the most vicious ways possible.  A mother and child get shotgunned from behind, killing both.  A good-hearted warrior gets decapitated, a sword THWACKING slowly through his stubborn neck.  Two young girls die at the hands of a serial killer hiding in plain sight.  Cannibals slow-cook an elderly man.  Reading these over again, I can't help thinking of that internet "doge" thing.

It's with this context that I ventured into the third season, which presented viewers with a version of the prison story.  Exciting, right?

Except David Morrissey played the Governor as more conflicted and internal, and his more outsized cruelties proved too much for AMC censors.  The TV version of the Governor was not the bullrush of chaotic energy he was in the comic, and the confrontation between the two camps was delayed for the fourth season.  "Disappointment" didn't begin to cover it.  So I stopped again.

And then friends, goddamnit, the bane of my existence, friends told me the fourth season was better.

At this point, it might've been better to just leave the show be, let its fans enjoy it, not get involved.  Hadn't I learned my lesson?  What value is there in denouncing a show that's disappointed you three times already?  Remember what George W. Bush said about "fool me once."  But I relented.  I watched.

And then, inexplicably, weirdly, impossibly...  I sort of liked The Walking Dead.

For all my frustration with the The Walking Dead's stubborn refusal to offer a larger story, it's the "vignette" episodes at the end of Season Four that showcase the series at its best.  With these episodes usually focused on just two or three characters at a time, the writers had no choice but to dig into those people and study who they are and how they tick.  Consider how teenaged Carl Grimes (Chandler Riggs) strikes out on his own in "After."  He fends off zombies, grabs a gallon-jar of pudding, and sits on the roof of a house and ladles the chocolate into his mouth as he looks over a busted surburbia.  A perfect depiction of a kid at the crossroads of puberty and adulthood in an unforgiving world.

(source: The Walking Dead, "After")

Equally intriguing is how this group of episodes shows characters not all that desperate to build a new community (which would thereby doom them once again to a broken community).  Instead, the different heroes all journey to potential homes.  Carl and Rick hold up in a suburban house, and Carl takes note of the gorgeous video game setup in a boy's room.  Tyreese (Chad Coleman), Carol (Melissa McBride), and two young girls take shelter in a farmhouse, the women preparing food while the man sits back in an easy chair.  Daryl runs afoul of a group of hunters, and we don't need to be told that their "good old boy" jocularity reminds Daryl of his dead brother, Merle (Michael Rooker).

And think of how distinctive the new trio of Abraham (Michael Cudlitz), Eugene (Josh McDermitt), and Rosita (Christian Serratos) are.  Yes, they feel like comic book characters.  But they also bring new types of characters to the show, ones that aren't the usual mode of raspy-voiced haunted survivor.  Abraham communicates with the brute cheer of a drill sergeant, while the rapid-fire dialogue from Eugene suggests someone stuck Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg in the body of Billy Ray Cyrus.  Rosita... well, okay, she's there to provide a midriff enticing to all parties, living and dead.

(source: The Walking Dead, "Claimed")

At the same time, the drama of these newer episodes sometimes veers into the didactic and obvious.  Daryl exorcises his redneck background by setting fire to a dumpy homestead loaded with moonshine.  The scene's replete with slow motion in case the significance wasn't clear enough.  Carol (Melissa McBride) confronts her new pragmatism with a choice stolen directly from Steinbeck (and executed with a forced "grace" that inspires chuckles instead of gasps).  And Glenn and Maggie search for each other with the same single-minded selfishness that made Sun and Jin such an eye-rolling part of the final seasons of Lost (you wonder if either of them had opinions about that magical island they were stuck on).

It's likely that some of the story and character inconsistency comes from AMC, the network that bankrolls The Walking Dead.  Throughout its run, Frank Darabont, Glen Mazzarra, and Scott Gimple took turns as showrunner for The Walking Dead, which probably led to the changes in how individual seasons functioned and how characters and plot were emphasized.  Consider how Mazzarra's second season stuck everyone in a barn, and how Gimple's fourth season split everyone up into unexpected pairs and groups.

(source: The Walking Dead, "Alone")

The largest problem with these recent episodes is that they hinge on yet another story where our heroes run afoul of a small haven that seems orderly on the surface but harbors ominous secrets.  A plot so common on the show that you wonder why the characters bother anymore.  Think of how the kindly CDC scientist had both no solution and a death wish.  How sweet-hearted Hershel hid zombies in his barn.  How the charismatic Governor was a private lunatic.  How the hospitable Terminites were cannibals.  And now how the orderly hospital is a Machiavellian nightmare.  In Romero's black-as-midnight Day of the Dead, a single internally rotting stronghold is plausible.  Here, the cavalcade of ruined societies becomes numbing.

Of course, Romero's films almost always carried an urgent political context, and The Walking Dead seems abjectly frightened of making any sort of larger social point.  What commentary it offers on the United States government is minimal and predictable: the CDC haven is a farce, as is a quickly abandoned quest for Washington DC.  And if the show has any sort of deeper social consideration, it's the consideration that frontier societies are fucked.  Full stop.

Which, in the end, is the problem I've had with The Walking Dead since it began.  It's so rare that there's anything significant to hold onto.  There's a niggling feeling that everything is arbitrary.  That the new characters we meet this week will probably be gone a few weeks from now.  That many old characters are waiting for their turn to punctuate mid-season finales with grisly deaths (Beth's death during the most recent finale felt especially contrived, cruel death to placate the masses).  That the resilient characters will continue to wander around until, as Troy McClure would say, the show ceases to be profitable.  That there's no real purpose, no theme buried beneath the surface to keep our brains humming afterward.  Although I mentioned The Odyssey in regards to the show's approach to narrative, The Walking Dead is closer to soap opera - but without the escape hatch of camp.

(source: The Walking Dead, "Days Gone By")

Despite my criticism, none of this is meant to damn the show as something objectively bad, something toxic, something unhelpful to the culture that should be put down like one of those walkers... or biters or skin-eaters or whatever it takes the writers to not use the dreaded "zed word," for fear people might not take this story with the utmost seriousness.

No, this show has its virtues, more now than in previous seasons.  And even back then, there was something about The Walking Dead that caused me to come back after three aborted attempts to "get it."  Maybe it's that we all want a great zombie show, and The Walking Dead has so many of the right ingredients - talented actors, fantastic gore effects, shocking twists - that the show occasionally succeeds despite itself.  And if I need a significant undercurrent to The Walking Dead, maybe there's one in simply admiring the show's dogged persistence, like its characters, moving forward on a path where survival is the goal and triumph is a rare treat to be savored.

The bummer is that, even now, when I'm finally on the show's side, The Walking Dead feels more like one of its zombies, lurching toward that most paramount of concerns: the smell of fresh blood.

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