"Welcome to our Ool"

There’s something wrong with you if you don’t like AMC’s The Walking Dead. Despite the viscera and brainstem separations intrinsic to the zombie sub-genre it’s a mega hit - shattered records - captivating everyone from lucky preteens with permissive parents to baby boomers introduced to the show by their kids.

I’m not blind, I see that the show has value: strong principle actors, lush, sweltering Atlanta-for-Atlanta setting, perfectly putrid zombies (thank the CGI folks and the make-up guru promoted to producer for the second season) – but it’s not enough. What’s most upsetting, is that not liking the show makes me feel inanely possessive of the “cult” or “genre” material I so love, and inherently, and pedestrianly, contemptuous of big-budget genre success, which I don’t want to be.

I like shows like True Blood and movies like Independence Day as much as any entertainment junkie and Alan Ball and Roland Emmerich are/were working with thundering budgets and studio support. Am I nuts? Why does AMC’s Herculean serialized zombie drama feel like a betrayal?

I don’t blame the show for not living up to press superlatives. Every outlet treated it like an infallible institution after six quick cuts. Those episodes were handled with such care, they constructed the heightened Dead world in striking imagery – a quixotic cop riding a horse down a highway packing serious heat, a group of survivors trapped in a department store wearing lab coats, elbow-length rubber gloves and face-shields while hacking a zombie corpse for sent camouflage, lots of tear and dirt streaked faces, lots and lots of zombie carnage – and they had discernable narrative structure: the escape from Atlanta episode, the CDC episode, etc.

They were good, but far from flawless. They did little for character and adrenaline-low periods were filled with protracted melodrama tolerable only when sandwiched between action and horror. Serious “real life” issues feel phoned-in when zombies are trying to eat you. Gang skirmishes, in-fighting, attempted rape, and racism are nuisance obstacles to survival, and no one wants to see rape as a cold side dish to a global plague.

Season two of The Dead has been a monotonous, biblically tragic playing out of a few tired plotlines, and the slowest dramatic storytelling I’ve encountered on film, maybe in books as well, including Victorian literature. Episodic television has done “heightened world” and “drama” at the same time, and done it for more than six episodes: Battlestar Galactica, 24, Lost, to name a few. Nancy Franklin, in a New Yorker review for a different show, writes: “It’s understandable that people working in TV would welcome the chance to stretch out a story, but that doesn’t necessarily make the story better.”

In addition to what feels like a disregard for entertainment conventions, character arcs are missing (aside from the male counter-lead developing into a solipsistic, murderous, emotionally regressed survival automaton.) We’ve seen mood swings from the rogue hick, group father, repressed widow, conflicted but loyal wife, but no arcing. Fans have argued that Glen is newly assertive since his romance with the farmer’s daughter – but they’re forgetting that he’s been authoritative, he ran a team op. in episode two, even Rick followed his lead.

The visual storytelling hasn’t been as good this season, which may have something to do with the loss of super producer/screenwriter Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) who was largely credited for the success of season one. The show, as entertainment, on a network producing stellar content (Mad Men, Breaking Bad) is falling short.

Are we watching because we’re supposed to? Are Andrew Lincoln’s stubbled jaw and Jon Bernthal’s pectoral muscles tipping the Kinsey scales? Are times so hard, the small pursuits that impel the majority of us so burdensome that we need to watch the death of ideals and possibilities in hour-blocks Sunday nights on AMC?

Critics and civilians call producers and writers bold, edgy, for risking dollars and time bringing genre to broader audiences – whether it’s Darabont and Gale Anne Hurd with The Dead or Colson Whitehead with his latest book, Zone One. Zombies (vampires, space travel, witches) are good stuff. Use it. Everyone should know the joys of reanimated brain-hungry corpses. But don’t mess it up.

The swimming pool in the mobile home community where my great-grandparents lived in Oceanside, CA had a sign that read: “Welcome to our Ool. Notice there is no “P” in our Ool. Please keep it that way.”

They’re peeing in the zombie pool.

Genre isn’t fringe because its stewards are lonesome misanthropes who like to watch grisly violence and laser-fire. There are different rules, different assumptions and priorities. It’s a place that shows the worst and best in human beings in a world beyond what is reasonable and common sense, beyond the flying cars or voodoo magic – a place that baptizes heroes in tears, blood, terror and triumph.

The world of The Walking Dead destroys its heroes. Poor Rick, when not on horseback he can’t keep the look of punishing torment off his face, even when he’s not having to put a cap in the crown of the zombified child of a group member. I loved the show for bringing Laurie Holden, the icy-hot, double-dealing, ultra high clearance fed from the X-Files, back to the small screen, until in an early episode her character asked, “would it be considered looting?” when contemplating taking a necklace from a display case (post zombie apocalypse, this is just bonkers) and later spent numerous episodes in a dreary fugue between fight and flight.
 

Equally sad to me, is that the show, in season two, is also destroying its villains, chiefly by entertaining the idea that zombies retain humanity, that they’re people. Zombies are frightening because they used to be our friends, but they are scourge, undead, soulless. Krista Tippett did a TV hour, Monsters We Love: TV's Pop Culture Theodicy (Dec 1, 2011) on her radio program On Being and focused largely on The Walking Dead, her guest Diane Winston, Knight Chair in Media and Religion at USC, said “Zombies kind-of push the boundaries of what is human … and so what is our response to them and our responsibility for them?”

Wrong.

It’s fine for unfamiliar viewers to be disturbed that zombie heads can be chopped off with no remorse, but this cult theater has never been about the zombies, it’s about the humanity of the people, however flawed, who survive. The show splitting humanity between zombies and survivors is not philosophically interesting and it’s not entertaining.

 

Fantasy, horror, or sci fi done wrong hurts genre more than a bad family or romantic comedy, like the Solyndra scandal hurt green energy in a way the BP spill could never hurt oil. Which leaves this true fan doubly disheartened.

In a recent NY Times piece, Robert Kirkman, creator of the graphic novels that inspired the series, now a producer on the show, said he hopes “The Walking Dead will run at least 20 seasons. Zombies are the new Simpsons.” With all due respect to Mr. Kirkman and all the talented people working on his show, The Simpsons have managed to tell topical stories, with comedy and drama and romance in entertaining episodic format for twenty-five years – I’d be surprised if The Dead made a fifth of that, without a serious identity overhaul.

For now, I’ll get my zombie fix with Romero and Raimi, I’ll watch every Resident Evil sequel Paul W.S. Anderson and his wife make, and I’ll keep my eyes to the horizon for the next promising flesh-eating horde.