Series Review: The Walking Dead (Season 1-3)

The end of The Walking Dead season 3 has come and gone and while some of us may have been a bit disappointed by the changes that were made from the comic to the television series, it only seems fair to give the series an overall review and examine it based on its own merits.  In fact, I will attempt, against my innermost urgings, to avoid comparing the two entirely.  If you want to read something that details the many changes from one medium to the other, this article does a good job of it.  Or you can check out the words of Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman himself in this interview (and many others across the web).  For now, I’ll run through the first three seasons and then give my own opinion on what makes the show work and what is lacking.

Season 1

In season one we get the classic introduction, learning about the fact that the zombie apocalypse has occurred and meeting many of the characters that will be with the show for years to come.  It starts with the central personality of Rick Grimes coming out of a coma to discover that everything has gone straight to hell-on-Earth.  He subsequently finds other survivors, including his wife, son and former partner on the police force, and they all do their best to survive.

At this point, the show still presents the characters with hope.  Surely the U.S. armed forces will come in and set everything back the way it should be, right?  But this does not occur and as the show progresses people begin to lose hope.  The cities have been overrun, the countryside is only slightly less dangerous and the main enemy is, as has always been the theme of The Walking Dead, the living, not the dead.

Eventually the group travels to a CDC installation and learns first hand that everything is crap and that there will likely be no returning from it.  There is no cure and so people must learn to survive on their own or just lay down and die.

Season 2

The show continues with the group wandering the highways, scrounging up whatever supplies they can and seeking someplace that they might be able to make into a permanent refuge.  They happen across a farm and meet a guy named Hershel who welcomes them in for a time.  But all is not right in paradise.  They discover that their new host keeps a barn filled with zombies, hoping that one day a cure might be found to return them to normal.  Tensions within the group begin to melt down, people get killed by both zombies and each other and then the whole charade explodes in a wave of zombie-swarming action.  The group is forced to move on, minus a few faces.

This season is often criticized for being too damn slow, and I agree somewhat.  The plotline involving the missing child Sophia goes on for so long that by the time it resolves no one cares anymore.  A host of secondary characters are introduced that manage to show their faces just long enough so that you say “Who the heck is that?” when they finally bite the dust in the season finale.

There is also a question of the mess that is made of character development in this series.  Most of the characters seem to spin in the same circles and learn little from their many experiences.  This is the point when Daryl becomes a huge fan favorite, though I’d venture a guess that it happened this way because the rest of the cast was so damn boring.  It was a low point in the show, though there were a few good moments.  Glenn fishing a zombie out of the well was one of my own personal fun highlights.

Season 3

This season begins with a quick jump through time.  It’s several months later and the group has been travelling about and surviving and searching for another place they might be able to call home.  Andrea, who was separated at the end of season 2, meets up with Michonne, a fan favorite from the comics.  Eventually, the main group finds a prison - the perfect place to set up a stronghold against the zombie hordes.  So they go in, clean it out, rescue some inmates that were trapped there and set up shop.

But lo and behold, there’s a bigger problem to deal with.  Nearby the prison is a town called Woodbury.  Here, a crazy man that people call The Governor has set up his own bastion of defense.  And once again, The Walking Dead shows us that the real enemies in the show are the living folks.  Conflict between the prison group and the Woodbury residents ensues, people die and the season ends with the surviving townies joining Rick and his crew inside the prison walls.

Season three has some good character development points along the way, but overall seems to go over the same ground with both the prison and Woodbury story arcs, punctuating the long-winded drama only occasionally.  Most of the series feels like it’s just there to build up to the climax.  There is some character development, but most of it lies beneath the surface or is poorly demonstrated.  The best things to come of this season were a few episodes that got devoted to developing specific characters - a storytelling method that is scarce within the show.  Oh, and the death of Lori was pretty awesome as well.  Seriously, weren’t we all just begging for it to happen?

Overall, the show has tried to rely on a dramatic essence that doesn’t work well in a horror series that needs to use so many characters to be realistic.  When the zombies show up, they generally do so to kill a character off or to break the slower parts up into more digestible chunks.  It often feels like there are no real horror writers on the staff, lending the show a lack of terror in most cases.  And what’s with the zombies teleporting in out of nowhere?  Seriously, this cliché has got to end before I tear my hair out with frustration.

I still enjoy The Walking Dead, but it contains way too much of the typical television drama format to be anything outstanding.  It’s a fun watch, has some interesting characters and we get to see zombies eating people semi-regularly.  I would be interested in sitting down and watching it again, except back-to-back as fast as I could manage.  That greater picture may create a more palatable show than manifests in the weekly-with-month-long-breaks format.

My greatest hope is that the coming of the new showrunner, Scott Gimple (who wrote the two best episodes of season 3) will bring a new flavor to the show.  I don’t mind it being slow at times, but make each moment of drama be relevant to the show’s overall development.  When you do drama right, it feels like the time is going by faster, not slower, and that’s really what The Walking Dead needs to go from a good show to a great show.

Walking Dead Promo courtesy of collider.com

Kirkman and Zombie photo courtesy of nerdmelta.com