First, if you love all things zombie and don't really care for content the way hardcore multiplayers don't care that the Halo 5: Guardians storyline was a huge bait-and-switch disappointment from what was marketed, then you can stop reading because there is absolutely nothing here that you will care to read. Your mind's made up and I'm not going to waste time trying to change it. (Also, I just had to get that off my chest about Halo 5).
 |
| Frank Darabont signing posters at San Diego Comic-Con in 2010; Darabont was one of the initial developers of The Walking Dead from its comic-book start in its first season before being fired under reduced budget pressure (photo courtesy Wikipedia: CC BY 2.0, uploaded by Abu-Dan via Flickr upload bot) |
Third, I used to dodge critiques of creative content on general principle: fellowship of the tradecraft and all that. But this year I saw firsthand how a really good idea goes through a push-pull process of becoming a Frankenstein end-product. A camel was a horse designed by a committee, and despite the best of intentions, you could really end up with an ugly baby, too. And you want to know that your baby is ugly so that you can get the kid some braces, maybe invest in some piano lessons, and prepare them for the overpriced therapy that will eventually be in store.
On to the reasons:
1. Failing the Cardinal Rule: It's a zombie show, AMC. You need to put the zombies front and center, and that means showing more of them than you did back in seasons 1, 2 and 3. Granted, the showrunners have gotten better at this in later seasons, and I understand that there's a budget for SFX which can't be blown in every episode. But still.
This particular sin was especially apparent in the second season, during the whole extended-stay sequence at Hershel's farm, when AMC and the showrunners gave us bookend zombie action: a zombie opening gambit; a zombie closing gambit which may or may not have ended in a cliffhanger; and a bunch of meaningless two-character dialogue sandwiched in between. (They still haven't quite outgrown that habit).
The season finale of season 1 -- the respite at the CDC building in Atlanta -- is a sharp dividing line for fans of the show's comic-book and television incarnations. The legacy comic-book fans argued that the whole scene wasn't in Robert Kirkman's tales (neither were the Dixon brothers) yadda yadda. Yet the beauty of that episode, for me, was the scientific take presented for the zombie outbreak. The scene of that normal brain shot and subsequently zombified on a live CAT scan screen was a great story element. For once, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a great plotting point: you have a zombie problem, you need a zombie solution.
That episode, in my view, was the best of the entire show to date. Yes, I said it.
But no, the showrunners had the doctor blow up the building with him still in it and the rest of our survivors ran to the hills and certain death in the final countdown. Way to go, AMC. I should have known this would become a pattern.
What's become obvious with each successive season since is that the zombies are the backdrop, that the show has migrated to a happy medium of wandering through the woods and fighting human-on-human fights. An astute observer on the IGN website's comments section said that The Walking Dead wasn't referring to the zombies, it was referring to the survivors, to the harsh decisions and cruel fates which needed to be meted out.
But the problem is The Walking Dead stops being a zombie show and becomes what it has been turning into: a soap opera. Sure, there are cute little terms tossed around like "slow burn" to justify the sluggish pace of the plot points, but I don't buy it.
No one bothers to explain or speculate how the outbreak began (in the case of Shane's death/transformation, there was even a confusing twist wherein you can become a zombie without getting bitten); no one bothers to think maybe if Rick's group could find some virologists or epidemiologists or microbiologists somewhere; no one bothers to explain jack shit. It's a person-on-person Atrocity Olympics, and if that's what the showrunners intended all along, they could have picked a better format instead of luring fans of zombie lore to this show and using the premise as a gateway drug for American Playhouse: Zombie Town.
2. Filler Dialogue: There is absolutely no point to most of the one-on-one character conversations on that fucking show. Character development, you say? I say bullshit.
A great writer and writing instructor named Leonard Bishop once wrote that a novel should be careful to not include too many two-character scenes. The advice always lingered in the back of my head when I wrote my stories, and it was a blaring klaxon every time I saw Rick and Shane discussing who was better at surviving calamity and coping; or Glenn and Hershel discussing how he could be a great post-apocalyptic snuggle buddy to Hershel's daughter; or Lori and Carl discussing some inane pre-zombie/post-zombie coming-of-age-too-quickly melodrama; and meantime it was often poor T-Dog just waiting to have a conversation with anyone.
The dialogue, the characters' actions, the subsequent transformation from one person to another, the emerging from some kind of chrysalis -- the change relevant to the storyline is what we expect with dialogue that takes swings at characterization. But my biggest gripe with the dialogue on The Walking Dead is that I really think it's a ham-handed, contrived placeholder for the next commercial sponsor, letting the producers catch their breath before they need to fund another zombie money shot.
No doubt it's expensive to shoot this kind of show, I'm sure. Could they afford to put zombies in every shot? Probably not. Do we expect zombies in every shot? I don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. The showrunners should have thought carefully about what audience expectations would be and planned its story arcs accordingly. As it is, they are succumbing to what we can call the " 'Lost' syndrome." That is, the propensity to make up new shit because your old plotlines painted you into a corner.
3. Where the Hell Are They Anyway: I guess the shooting budget trade-off for all the increased zombie SFX is the perpetual rurality of our hapless groups' environs. I doubt we will ever see them reach the edges of a major metropolitan area, where it is likely that the kinds of things they need to continue surviving (canned food, dry goods, medicine) are in more plentiful supply. That's too bad, because a group of hardened zombie fighters like Rick's group would face some very interesting challenges working their way through city streets teeming with undead.
It would also create opportunities to fashion some new and curiously sourced weapons. But again, unlikely that we'll ever go there. From rural road to corn field to farm to outlying prison to fortified suburban gated community, these will be the setpieces of future doom. It's curious that they are still supposedly somewhere in the Georgia countryside, possibly skirting Alabama or South Carolina; so when are we going to see a hurricane episode? Or did the zombie outbreak alter weather patterns, too?
4. Dying for a Living: This is probably the show's greatest sin. Even if all the hours of scriptwriting devoted to characterization create layers and nuances that hint or howl out the characters' motivations, it is all for naught when exploited for cheap thrills at guessing who will be the next recurring character to get the axe, pun intended. Currently the comment boards are speculating if it may be true that Daryl Dixon is going to be killed off, since actor Norman Reedus is poised to start a travelogue show featuring his passion for motorcycles. (It's doubtful that AMC will kill off such a hugely popular character, and one for which the network owns the full intellectual property rights; more likely, Reedus' show will be testing for audience potential for Daryl Dixon's character in his own The Walking Dead spinoff).
That's the point of reference for watching the show now, that's its churn: get the audience to tune in by any means necessary, and that means creating characters in whom readers are emotionally invested, string them along, and off them. Ooh, it's the cruel dark world they live in now, ooh you can't feel sympathy for anyone, ooh the rules are out the window.
What a cheap carrot-and-stick game the producers have fashioned. It illustrates that they really don't think audiences are intelligent or mature enough to ask about the larger, more obvious questions of where this entire group of self-styled survivalists is going, that all they care about is what's over the next hill. I guess in the final season, maybe once this concept has jumped the shark, they'll wrap everything up with a quick ending.
I was among the hopeful plenty who saw Greg Nicotero and his team's excellent SFX work in making the zombies as realistically scary as possible back when the show first aired in 2010. But since then, this show has devolved into a constant set of disappointments interrupted by the occasional decent script. See you in syndication, The Walking Dead; hope you reach your 100-episode watermark.
Now I'm off to see what Ash and his Evil Dead have been up to.
No comments:
Post a Comment