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.

Fear The Walking Dead

If you’re going to watch a lot of television shows, it’s worth figuring out what sort of themes you like the most.  For some reason, I’ve never been able to interest myself in shows about solving murders.  I’m (probably) never going to murder anyone, so it all seems largely irrelevant.  However, any show with a hint of zombie apocalypse goes straight on my watchlist.  If I follow my own logic, then this should mean that I fully expect to live through humanity being killed off by the undead.  But then, I don’t think I do see this in my future.  Yet, it’s still feels more relevant to my life.  And this is most likely because half my days are spent in a zombie-like routine, catching the same buses, standing in the same spots on Tube platforms, thumbing through the same apps and repeatedly writing the same office emails.  It’s not quite apocalyptic, but its tedium is probably as painful as being eaten alive by cadavers.

Anyway, we’ve got distracted.  The point is, I love anything about zombies.  Ever since I was dragged to see 28 Days Later (actually about an infection), I’ve never found anything as compelling as working out what I would do in the same situation.  That said, I still don’t have a plan.  And so, with the eighth series of The Walking Dead hitting UK screens, it’s time to turn attentions to the spin off, mostly because I’ve just finished the second series.

With the democratisation of TV content, allowing viewers to pick their own schedules, a model that’s done so well for Netflix and Amazon, it was an absolute mugging off that BT did the worst thing ever with Fear The Walking Dead on its UK launch by holding it hostage on its paid-for channels in order to force people to sign up.  Instead, people simply resorted to pirating it, so go fudge yourselves, BT.  I have been a good boy and simply hung on for the episodes to come under Amazon Prime.

The show’s lack of ubiquity is a real shame, as its quality really is up there with The Walking Dead.  Sure, the gore maws your eyes sore, but having the fall of civilisation as a backdrop really makes a good character arc seem all the more compelling.  The action centres on LA in the early days of the outbreak, complementing The Walking Dead’s setting in the well-established future of the same apocalypse.  The tension that dominates the first series as the characters try and work out what’s going on while we’re fully clued up on their fates makes for epic viewing.

But, it’s actually very hard to like any of the characters.  The show still has you rooting for them to survive, but they mostly are a real bunch of bastards.  This continues into the second series and ties in with the theory that, while monsters may walk the earth, humans will always be the biggest bad guys.

Beyond describing the premise as following a band of survivors attempting to live out the end of days, there’s not much else you need to know.  Comparisons to The Walking Dead might be all we have.  While everyone in that show looks sweaty as balls in the Georgia humidity, Fear The Walking Dead plays out in the dry heat of California and beyond.  As someone who is almost always too hot and can barely keep any clothes on, my biggest concern is how someone can bear to wear jeans in a desert, not the fact that they are being chased by brain-devouring zombies.

The languages geek within me loves the fact that a good portion of the show switches between Spanish and English, and you’re definitely in for a treat if you like boats.  The Walking Dead’s zombie lore is well observed, though Fear The Walking Dead does rely a great deal on the fact that smearing yourself with dead people’s bodily mush disguises to zombies that you are still alive.  It’s a bit too easy.

Zombie-based dramas trump a lot of other themes, simply because any and all of the characters can die at any minute.  It might sound macabre to enjoy this, but what else can consistently provide such strong human drama?  In murder mysteries, the victim is already dead, lying there cold and inert in a chilly morgue.  In Fear The Walking Dead, the victims of death stalk the earth having a lot more fun (and doing that sort of breathy growling they enjoy so much).  Just don’t watch it straight before bed as you will be too tense to sleep, unless you have finally numbed all your emotions by watching too much of this sort of thing.