The Walking Dead: A Review of Season one and half of season 2 (Television Addiction)

This is part of my "Television Addiction Series" which I explained about HERE.  The Television Addiction series is part of my so-called "Scripted Review Series", which I explained about HERE.  For the original 2013 post on which this is based, see: Television Addiction Part 2: Oh the TV Shows I’ve Seen!

The original 2013 post reads: 

The Walking Dead (1 and 1/2 seasons)

            This show was very popular in my office and because my co-workers (mostly my male co-workers) kept talking about how great it was, I decided to check it out.

            I made it through the first season and half of the second season and then I just stopped.

            I like zombie movies, don’t get me wrong.  Those old George Romero movies The Night of the Living Dead, and Dawn of the Dead are among my favorite films of all time.

            But, I’ve decided zombies are villains with a complexity best suited to an hour and a half movie.  I do not have the patience to sit through 20 hours of zombies. 

            Horror movies work best in small doses to begin with, otherwise they just get too exhausting.  Plus zombies aren’t really a complex villain.  You don’t need 20 hours to understand their motivations.  They walk slow and they feed on brains.

            “But zombie movies were never supposed to be about the zombies,” my co-workers told me when I made this complaint.  “The best zombie movies have always been about the conflicts the humans have with each other.”

            And I agreed with this.  But although there were lots of petty arguments arising among the humans in The Walking Dead, I never saw anything that grabbed my attention and made me want to keep watching.

            And another thing: Zombies are really scary when you’re trapped in an empty house at night in the countryside outside a graveyard, a la Night of the Living Dead.  But of course you remember what happens in that movie the next morning, right?  The sheriff and his posse go door to door shooting all the remaining zombies.

            My point is, although zombies can terrify isolated groups of people for a limited amount of time, they’re not a problem that poses any long-term threat to organized humans. 

            I do not buy for one minute the premise of The Walking Dead that there was a zombie apocalypse that overran the US military.  And the fact that I couldn’t suspend my disbelief for this premise also hindered my getting involved in this show.

            I regret to say this caused some disagreement between me and my other co-workers.  Some of them argued passionately that the zombies would definitely have overran the US military, but I just didn’t see it happening.

            “But they would have over-run the US military by sheer numbers!" my co-workers said.

            Listen, sheer numbers never won any battle.  The British Raj would never have been established in India if the Indians could have beaten them with sheer numbers.  (Nor could the British and French have burned down the summer palace in Peking for that matter.)   Whoever has the guns and the organization will win any conflict.

            Where all these zombies are coming from, and how many there are, is still a matter of debate in my office, but I maintain no matter how many zombies there are, they would never over-run the US military.