The Walking Dead

I don’t know if I can carry on with The Walking Dead.  It doesn’t give a lot back.  I’m persevering because, when it’s at its best, it’s truly among the most impactful television I have ever seen.  But series eight, which has just returned from its mid-season break, is a gruelling and gruesome onslaught of hopelessness.

I mean, who has a mid-season break anyway?  With the average American series over twenty episodes, compared to Brits calling it a day after about six or seven, I realise I don’t have a leg to stand on.  But where are the other mid-season breaks in adult life?  I’m very much in favour of bringing some sort of half term to working life, otherwise it’s just endless, isn’t it?

But anyway, they’ve had a good innings.  Who’d have thought such an incredibly graphic and violently gory drama would attract such international acclaim?  There was a slight head start from its roots in a series of popular comic books, but I don’t know anything about these really, so I won’t wade in with my views (though a lack of knowledge has never really stopped me before).  In short, the initial premise is that a man wakes up from a coma to find that a zombie apocalypse has taken hold on the USA.  Cue eight seasons of struggles to stay alive.

And what a man.  Rick Grimes is the Southern sheriff whose sweat-soaked shoulders end up bearing the weight of leadership: he finds himself the de facto head of a ragtag band of survivors.  Around him, there develops a cult of Rick.  He seems to be able to keep people safe.  Repeatedly, the characters end up in nice new communities: planting a few crops (they seem to favour beans), sticking spikes through zombies’ heads at their perimeter fence to avoid being overrun, teaching the children how to cope (mixed ability, of course).  This obviously lowers the scope for drama, so it never lasts long.  After a while, you begin secretly to wish it will all go terribly wrong.  After a bit longer, you realise this is inevitable and merely bide your time until the undead stream into whichever compound and thin out the cast a bit.

However, Rick doesn’t go around mansplaining how to kill a zombie to a bunch of terrified mother hens.  He’s epic, but the strong female characters run rings around him.  Michonne, Sasha, Tara, Rosita and Maggie are just some of the bad motherf*ckers keeping his show on the road.  For me, though, the most impressive is Carol.  While every cast member of The Walking Dead grows and develops, Carol’s beginnings as a brow-beaten housewife couldn’t be further from where she ends up.  The first episode of series five, No Sanctuary, is proof of her undeniable badassery.  It’s one of the greatest things I have ever seen.  Take a bow, Melissa McBride.

This is what happens to Rick’s people.  They get tough.  And then they come across other people that are softer, and dominate them, or they come across other tough people, and fight with them.  This seems to be the rut we are stuck in.  With each series, more times passes since the apocalypse.  The undead might be more decayed than before, but it’s the humans who are even more monstrous.

I’ve already covered the spin-off show, Fear The Walking Dead, where I mentioned that the constant threat of death makes the drama more intense.  Your favourite could be killed at any juncture.  Never are they more at risk than at the huge storyline climaxes that have punctuated the start and end of each season (and each mid-season for that matter).

It’s these peaks that have been more like troughs in recent series.  In an effort to avoid being predictable and allowing its main characters to seem immortal, The Walking Dead will desperately cull a few of them, just to keep you on your toes.  But these deaths feel like betrayals, particularly when they don’t take the storylines anywhere.  There’s a balance to be struck here, but the striking has failed to hit the mark like it used to.

I should have seen the end in sight when a tiger appeared in the second episode of the seventh season.  Shiva might also be in the comics, but this wild animal’s introduction in The Well, obeying its human masters, shattered many illusions for me.  The dead coming back to life?  I’ll buy it.  But a tiger that knows which people to maul based on the community they come from?  Come on!

Countless friends have abandoned ship, complaining that the storylines are too drawn out, that there is too much build up before the release of any action.  But then series eight has been constant battle action, and that doesn’t feel right either.  When you’ve invested so much in a show, you feel it owes you something.  I’m sticking with it in case I can work out what I feel it owes me.  Maybe I’ll know when I see it.  I don’t want to be a fan that expects everything to be done just to please them, so I’m bearing in mind that this is still one of the best shows out there (which I seem to say every single week on here…).

Given my love of trash (Bromans, Survival Of The Fittest, Geordie Shore), I’ll tolerate a lot of things.  I’ve come to terms with how much the cast perspire in the 100% Georgia humidity.  I don’t mind that so many of them seem to be British, which makes me constantly scrutinise their accents for an accidental syllable of Home Counties pronunciation.  I don’t mind that the rest were in The Wire.  I could handle The Cell (series seven, episode three) when Daryl is held captive and tortured with the same song on loop (ruin your day here).  And finally, I can handle the current storyline doldrum.

The reason for this is series two, episode seven, Pretty Much Dead Already.  It ends with an epiphany.  It makes you question all you thought you knew about zombies, about humans and about humanity.  It turns on its head the unwritten rules of TV.  I felt like the sofa had collapsed away from under me and I was freefalling into a new world.

I’m just waiting for that to happen again.