Some Thoughts on The Walking Dead

I actually didn't start watching The Walking Dead until a couple years ago. When the rest of the world was on Season Five, I was starting from the very beginning. By the end of that season, I had caught up with the entire series, but while I had often enjoyed it, I decided by this time that I was all done. The story was repetitive: Rick's group meets some new people, they have to figure out whether or not to trust these new people, they consider whether it's possible to hang onto their humanity in a zombie-infested post-Apocalyptic world. Rinse and repeat. The seasons, I felt, were too damn long. Game of Thrones needs ten hours per season to tell an extremely complex story populated with dozens of important characters. Does The Walking Dead really require sixteen hour-long episodes per season to tell its story? Invariably, each season has some serious lulls - maybe three dull episodes for every one great one. The characterization can also be either inconsistent (as in the case of Andrea and the Governor) or sort of one-note (Merle). Don't get me wrong - it was fun at times, and there were great individual episodes (the one where the gang sees that backpacker by the side of the road but they don't pick him up, the one where Carol and Tyreese have to take care of those two sisters, etc.). But five seasons was enough for me.

I actually haven't watched Season Six, and I hadn't even heard about the cliff-hanger at the end. But I couldn't help but hear the chatter about the bloody premier of Season Seven. At first I told myself I didn't want to know the specifics, in case I ever resumed watching. But my curiosity quickly got the better of me, and I watched the big moments on Youtube.

*Spoiler Alert*

Much ink has already been spilled in the week since we lost Glenn and Abraham. I saw this little comment on a Youtube video of their death scenes: "Violets are Blue/Roses are Red/People are triggered/Because Glenn is dead." Cute. The problem, though, is not that I'm offended or "triggered" by extreme violence. It seems doubtful to me that anyone who is "triggered" by violence - even violence as extreme as the beating Glenn took - would have made it all the way to Season Seven of this series. Hell, the violence is part of what I love about the show. Remember when the gang hoisted that fat walker out of the well and its stomach burst open? That was gross and awesome.

So accurate.

Here's the bigger problem: if you ask an audience to care about a character, it is incumbent upon you as a writer to care about that character as well. This isn't to say that nothing bad can happen to sympathetic characters: Ned Stark in Game of Thrones and Adriana la Cerva in The Sopranos both suffer horrible fates, much worse than what they deserve, and their deaths were two of the most poignant in television history. By offing Glenn in such a gratuitous, almost gleefully violent fashion, the writers disrespected a character whom many fans have grown to love, and by extension, they disrespected their audience. They gave Glenn the kind of death usually reserved for random stock teenagers in slasher flicks. This type of over-the-top gore is totally acceptable in something like Final Destination. We have no emotional attachment to any of the poor souls in those movies, who are being killed by tanning beds and staple guns. There's nothing inherently wrong with those movies. They're fun, and they feed our human curiosity and thirst for macabre spectacle. But they are low art; they aspire to be nothing more than slasher flicks.

Maybe I shouldn't be judging The Walking Dead as anything more than a mindless gore-fest. It's only a zombie show, for crying out loud. But the thing is, it certainly seems to want to be recognized as more than that. And at times, it has succeeded: some of later episodes of Season Four, for example, reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. At its best, The Walking Dead succeeded because it was, however improbably, an introspective, even philosophical show about zombies.

In a letter to TWD fans before this season's premier, Robert Kirkman, the author of the comic books and co-creator of the show, wrote: "We did want you to talk. And talk you are." Well ok - mission accomplished. You got me to talk about a show I haven't actually watched in more than a season.

But the creators need to understand that all this talk will come at the expense of TWD's being considered as a serious show. When Neegan's bat came down on Glenn's head, the show formally announced what some had suspected for a while: that it had chosen Low Art and "talk" over Higher Art and respect. I was already done with this show. Now I'm even doner.

P.S. - I reject the argument that Glenn's death was fine because it was true to the comics. Comic books play by a different set of rules. TWD was free to veer from the plot of the comic books, as they have done many times before. This reminds me of the lame defense of Matthew Crawley's death in Downton Abbey (another really disappointing tv moment), that he was leaving the show and they had to kill him off. Bad tv is bad tv - regardless of what is happening outside the world of the show.