Trash TV: The Walking Dead Seasons 1-3

Note: Going to take January off blogging, enjoy 2023 y’all

So I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but The Walking Dead recently ended after airing for forty years continuously. I have a strange and mysterious inclination to get involved in pop cultural media right before they end, so I decided now would be the perfect time to travel all the way back to 1962 and check out the first three seasons of AMC’s putrid golden goose.

 I have actually tried to watch this before, way back when it was first coming out in the early 18th century, but I lost interest a few episodes in. Not because I thought the show was bad or anything, it just wasn’t vibing with me. That said, I’m not going into this completely fresh either, since a lot of the big moments and character deaths have been widely discussed online. This actually enhanced certain aspects of the show for me–for example, I’ve known for years that there’s a badass grey-haired woman named Carol among the main cast, so I was thrown for a loop when she’s introduced in the second episode as a scared, timid woman being abused by her husband.

“Ooh!” I said. “I wonder how she turns into a zombie-killing murder-machine?” Whereas I imagine to first-time viewers she’d be completely unremarkable.

Anyway, in case you’re not familiar with the premise of the show: Sheriff Rick Grimes wakes up from a weeks-long coma to discover that oops zombies, so he embarks on a quest to find his wife and son. He does this refreshingly quickly, but this isn’t quite the stroke of good fortune it appears to be because as it turns out, Humans Are The Real Monsters.

If you’ve seen any zombie media made in the last twenty five years then what follows won’t be surprising–there are zombie hordes, people get bitten and have to be put down before they turn, the survivors encounter secure settlements that turn out to be run by violent maniacs or cannibals or whatever. The only unique factor is that the show runs on classic George Remero zombie rules rather than the “infected only” idea that most modern zombie stories use, which means that anyone who dies for any reason turns into a zombie, not just people who die from zombie bites. The fact that the characters aren’t initially aware of this is relevant, although not as relevant as I thought it was going to be–they start noticing zombies with no bites and think it’s weird, but there’s only really one or two scenes where an unexpectedly-reanimating corpse poses any danger.

While we’re on the subject of zombie rules, Frank Darabont was the showrunner for the first season before getting kicked off due to behind the scenes drama, and he evidently had plans to diverge pretty heavily from both the comics and the classic Romero ruleset. In the first season the zombies move a lot faster and display signs of rudimentary intelligence, being able to climb obstacles and interact with simple mechanical objects like door knobs. You even see one in the early episodes that appears to be stalking Rick from a distance. From the second season onwards this behavior abruptly ceases and we’re back to the shuffling, slow-moving, completely brainless zombies that have so saturated pop culture.

(Apparently the wider Walking Dead universe has recently introduced the idea of “variant” zombies that are smarter and faster, and it’s been stated that the season one zombos were actually those, but this is such an obvious retcon that I’m not taking it seriously)

I actually wish the show had stuck with Darabont’s ideas, because one element of The Walking Dead that starts to overstay its welcome is the walking dead themselves. This is a problem, given that they’re the entire premise of the series.

I’ve written before about how zombie media has to bend over backwards to disguise the fact that classic “slow” zombies wouldn’t actually be that much of a threat, and The Walking Dead is maybe the most blatant example of this I’ve ever seen. From the second season onwards the zombies gain the power of off-screen invisibility, being able to pop out of the side of the frame to chomp on people who definitely should have been able to see them, as well as evade detection remarkably well despite being rotting corpses that moan constantly (no one ever seems to smell the zombies).

Then there’s the humans, who when being chased by zombies love to do things other than run away from the zombies. This includes, but is not limited to: taking random pot-shots at individual zombies just for the hell of it, stopping to point out to other characters that they are currently being chased by zombies, being instantly incapacitated by minor trips and falls, or just standing there as the zombies slowly approach going “Oh nooooo, zombieeeeeees!!!”

The first season handles the inherent limitations of zombies as enemies by putting the survivors into situations where those limitations are negated, such as being trapped in narrow city streets or inside a building, but from the second season onwards these people are running from zombies in open fields and they still can’t get away from them with any degree of effectiveness.

The show does throw the humans a bone by giving the zombies skulls made out of paper-mache, such that they can be easily pierced by any reasonably rigid object, including tree branches. Doing so will result in their instant death. As such, when they stop failing to run away from the zombies and start fighting, they can slay dozens with ease.

Now this is all kind of goofy and hard to take seriously, but it’s not damning in and of itself–this is, after all story about how Humans Are The Real Monsters, and it’s the human drama that really shines. Up until the second half of season three, that is. Something had been nagging me about the various storylines going on up until that point. Love triangles, baby drama, annoying kids misbehaving–it all seemed kind of familiar. Where had I seen all of this before?

Then Rick starts hallucinating his dead wife, who’s swanning around in a flowy white gown, and it finally clicked: I was watching a soap opera. These plot points were so familiar because it’s the same fucking nonsense that nearly all American TV shows include as filler, only The Walking Dead is somehow even more soap-ish and cheesy than your usual spy drama or detective show. All the death and zombies obscure it, but once you see a Ghost Wife in a white gown mooning at Rick, the inner soap comes crashing through.

The truth is, The Walking Dead is an incredibly stupid piece of work that managed to avoid recognition as such because it approached its subject matter with more gravitas than was typical for the time and was willing to kill off characters at the drop of a hat.