The Walking Dead
In my review of the season premiere The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, I made something clear to the readers: I preferred it when the show was about a small, ragged band of survivors trying to get through a dangerous world. The communities they encountered then tended to be small. Governor’s Woodbury was probably the biggest, and it was still early days. The Termites had their whole cannibal business going, but they were the kind of sadistic, desperate community you’d expect to find in such a cruel and unforgiving world.
The best episodes of this show were the ones like “Nebraska” when the threat was small but dangerous. Or “Vatos” when the community Rick’s team faced had amazing depth and felt like something you might actually encounter in the early days of a zombie apocalypse.
But once Rick and the team arrived in Alexandria, everything changed. And I don’t just mean that the show itself took on a negative quality, although during the sorry Savior Wars – Seasons 7 and 8 – it certainly did. I mean the fundamental nature of the show changed. What was once the story of a team always on the move became the story of a team trying to settle down. For me, personally, and I think for a lot of other fans, that blew my mind The Walking Dead’s sails — not so much because they tried to settle in (an understandable effort in a zombie apocalypse), but because they succeeded.
That admission — which hardly pleases me because the show insists on focusing on large communities rather than a group down the road — was met with some backlash online, which is strange because I almost never get backlash online for my TV reviews. shows , but I thought I should make a simple touch on this topic, as I think it is important and something to remember not only with Those Who Live, but all the other spinoffs that AMC pumps for The Walking Dead.
It’s not so much that it’s hard to please me just because of the shift to large communities, but because this change was handled incredibly poorly and with little foresight. I could a Game of Thrones style TWD very funny. Instead, what we get almost always amounts to something like this:
- The Hero Group arrives at the Place. The place is run by good or bad people. Through various conflicts, the Hero Group causes the Place to fall, leading to the destruction of the Good or Evil people who live there. Hero Group either moves on or creates the Place.
- The New Villain Group arrives at the Place. The Hero Group has to fight against the Villain Group. Hero Group wins. Hero Group either moves on or creates the Place. If they proceed. . . (if the Hero Group remains, skip the next step . . . ).
- Some members of the Hero Group go to a new place run by Good or Bad people. Through various conflicts, the Hero Group causes the Place to fall, leading to the destruction of the Good or Evil people who live there.
- The New Villain Group arrives at the Place. . .
And the rest, and the rest, and the rest, and the rest. There aren’t really complex or interesting political dynamics at play during these conflicts. Gregory getting Rick to kill the Saviors was about as close to that as we’ve ever seen and all it led to was a long war with Negan, basically black and white / good vs evil in nature.
Beyond that, we have another long-running war with the Whisperers, of a black-and-white, good-versus-evil nature, with only the slightest deviations from the trend (the best part being Negan’s Alpha double-cross). None of these groups represent morally complex societies. The protracted conflict with the Commonwealth had some very harsh politicization, although it never developed in any coherent way. Mostly it was just a rehash of all the conflicts that came before, only now with ice cream and freshly pressed linen. Now CRM and the high-tech society will raise the bar, but will it offer anything truly new in terms of storytelling? I expect we will have much the same thing, as with the bad French group Daryl Dixon or the Croatian people within Dead City. Meet the new villain as well as the old villain. Good luck staying awake.
What is strange to me about all of this is that it is so linear. In a story like game of thrones, we know that all these various powerful cohorts exist simultaneously. Here we have the Lannisters, here the Starks, here the Targaryens, there the Free Cities and Slaver’s Bay. In The Walking Dead, Our team just maneuvers into one team at a time, dismisses said team, and then moves on. There is no sense of a larger world in the game.
Sure, Rick says in one of his sad, endless narrations in this first episode that the world is “so much bigger and so much smaller” (yes, Gimple-speak), but that’s not something we’ve really shown throughout during the course of the entire performance. Even look at spinoffs like Fear, it’s just a series of completely detached communities of villains like the Vultures or the Isle Of The Bird People or whatever. That’s not how you tell a long, connected story. CRM has been teased for ages now — and yes, of all shows, it is World Beyond which probably did the most to add some connective tissue – but it feels more like the final level in some linear video game than part of a living, breathing world.
And that’s the point: Either have a great zombie survival story about characters on the road trying to survive, or create an interesting post-apocalyptic world with various centers of power that are somehow connected and in conflict with each other. Not just this one off war between the Saviors and the Kingdom/Hilltop/Alexandria, why if there is this big Commonwealth nearby and an even bigger CRM not so far away, why do we never see them until several seasons later? This weird linearity makes the whole thing feel inauthentic and detracts from the world building.
I guess I’m not planning ahead, but at this point we not only have the aforementioned communities, but also New Babylon with its marshals and almost certainly some other communities I’m forgetting, not to mention whatever other community AMC wants to pull, like a rabbit , from his magic hat. and you’d think at some point all these communities would be competing for resources, sending emissaries or just talking about each other.
Why is New Babylon looking for Negan with old wanted posters, but CRM is completely out of it? What is the relationship between New Babylon and the Commonwealth/Alexandria to begin with, given that Negan was involved in both of these communities initially? And how is all this captured? In Fear the location of Bird People Island was this big secret, obviously, and it was supposed to be this Very Big Deal, but in the end it’s just some speedboats and some guys. I don’t understand the scope of any of it, nor the geography. It’s as if mapping the geographic or political terrain of this Extended Walking Dead Universe wasn’t bothered at all. And when you don’t plan a little ahead, you get the end Lost or the Star Wars sequel to the trilogy or global climate change. Regardless, it really hurts the show for those of us who want some continuity and coherence and just verisimilitude at times. This helps build stakes and tension. And that doesn’t mean there can’t be surprises or new encounters, but at some point everything has to make sense.
I know, people will say “It’s just a zombie show” (and I shouldn’t review it if I don’t like all the other claptrap too). Well, I guess I keep hoping that the premiere zombie show, and one that continues to churn out new content year after year, would take the time and put in the work to make it better. And if taking on that task is too much, go back to your roots and give us the zombie nomad survival show we used to have, when this was a cultural phenomenon and not just a sad, sleazy version of itself.
Of course, I wrote a whole thing about the nonsense of hope, so maybe I’m crazy. Maybe we’re all crazy here, those of us still tripping over the tea party. Then again, when I asked Alice she said, “I’m afraid so. You are absolutely awful. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”
here you go my video review his series premiere Those Who Live:
PS There are, of course, many other problems with this franchise, including a lack of any kind of script quality control, a general lack of quality control, and so on, but I wanted to focus more on that particular problem for this particular post.
