A Throwing the Remote Special Comment
The Walking Dead isn’t a movie, but it might as well be. Debuting Halloween night on AMC television, the Frank Darabont-directed series pilot packed more terror and intrigue into an hour and ten minutes than any horror film I’ve seen in the last ten months.
With the zombie fatigue that’s gripping pop culture (take notice, vampires: your dawn’s approaching, too), it’s easy to write the show off as a serialized mash-up of The Stand and 28 Days Later. And while the plots are indeed carbon copies of each other, the story, characters, and pacing are so rich that I almost forgot I was watching another man-wakes-up-from-a-coma-after-the-zombie-apocalypse story.
What makes the show special is the way it takes its time unfurling the great mystery of what kicked off the undead plague. Andrew Lincoln plays Sheriff’s Deputy Rick Grimes, an earnest Georgia family man who’s shot following a high-speed chase. Until that moment, life had been unremarkable; there’s a great, long scene where Grimes and his partner Shane (Jon Bernthal) discuss their relationship problems that reminded me of something Tarantino might write if he’d had a Garrison Keillor phase. But once Grimes wakes up, nothing about the world makes sense.
He wanders the barren hospital, and then the streets of his small town, finding bodies and over-turned trucks everywhere. It isn’t until Grimes meets Morgan Jones (Lennie James) and his young son that he gets a fuller picture of what’s happened. The family has been holed up in a fortified house, doing their best not to attract attention; luckily, their new friend has the keys to the Sheriff’s Department armory. Grimes leaves them heavily armed as he makes his way to Atlanta in search of more survivors.
All of this is familiar territory; in fact, I don’t think there’s an original idea in The Walking Dead. Darabont knows this, and has compensated by bringing us actors who know how to play up the drama by being genuine, and by letting us fill in the blanks of the zombie war via dazzling visual cues (the one-way car graveyard leading out of the city; the abandoned tanks and mounted machine guns downtown). The first episode exudes desperation and barrenness, and through a handful of great performances, we feel it as well as see it—making the well-worn seem brand new.
The other factor that really sells this show is the gruesome practical effects work of Greg Nicotero and his KNB gang. I don’t know how many hundreds of extras were used in the first episode, but from what I could tell they all wore unique, highly detailed appliances—without the cheap gag of having zombie football players and nurses running around to give the scenes “color”. It’s amazing the amount of violence and gore one can pull off on TV today. This is definitely an R-rated show, but don't worry: the power of these bloody money shots lies in the fact that they're not the whole show.
What put me firmly in fan territory was the climactic tank scene. I won’t give away too much, but a zombie horde traps Grimes, and Darabont shoots his impending doom as if he was bringing one of his own nightmares to life. I didn’t have a panic attack during the tank scene, but my heart quickened for sure. You may think there’s no way a TV series would kill off its main character in the pilot, but remember that the show-runner is the same guy who re-wrote the end of The Mist (I’m not telling, either way).
It’s impossible to know after just one episode whether or not The Walking Dead can maintain this level of gripping drama over a whole season (which, I understand, is only six episodes long)—especially since Darabont only wrote and directed the first one. But he’s done his job. I’m hooked.
For those of you who complain that there’s nothing good on TV—a claim that has been easily disprovable for at least ten years—you officially have no more excuses to ignore the boob tube. Between Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, and now The Walking Dead (and a host of other great series that don’t involved gym, tan, and laundry), we’re living in the Platinum Age of Television. The landscape is dotted with programs for adults; shows that boast ridiculous production budgets, actors who treat the camera with as much respect as a Broadway audience, and writing so sharp that it can smooth over the hardest-to-stomach conventions. On today's TV menu, dinner is the dessert. Eat up.