AMC zombie series from Frank 'Majestic' Darabont - The Walking Dead

I swear we had a thread for this.

Anyway: the sun ain't gonna shine anymore

is it actually a remake of 28 days later, or does it just start sort of the same?

It is based on a comic book I have never read, and I have been reliably informed that it was written before 28 Days Later.

Here is the thread for the comic, which I'm not reading because of possible spoilers: The Walking Dead: C/D

it is its own unique property (originally a comic book)

fair enough. maybe 28 days later ripped off the comic. it's just the whole waking-up-in-the-hospital shtick.

Like 28 Days Later, it steals the opening of Day of the Triffids--guy wakes up in hospital to find the world has gone to hell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP0eYSF2Z1w

andrew lincoln w/an american accent

this is gonna own

Cautiously excited about this; I read the first 60 or so issues of the comic and it would make easy fodder for four or five seasons. Comic is very good, btw.

If you are interested in the series, stay away from the ILC thread and the book; no idea how close they're sticking to the original storyline but it looks like it'll likely be spoiler heavy.

mmmmm I'm really excited for these. Some of these zombie apocalypse movies suffer from having to rush the whole examination of the breakdown of society but here they can take their sweet time.

these=this

Yeah, I've read through Vol. 11 of the trade paperback collections. Always looking forward to new issues.

Very encouraging trailer, love the McCloud-esque vibe of the horseback bit. Given that Darabont worked with the entire film crew from The Shield whilst making The Mist I bet he's got a pretty tight idea of how to direct this kind of thing too.

Fan-made opening credits sequence. Pretty darn cool
http://vimeo.com/15266890

Can't wait for this. I've purposefully avoided the comics to avoid spoilers. Hopefully it lasts at least 3-4 seasons. Last I checked season 2 wasn't guaranteed yet, so fingers crossed.

I'm really really hyped about this; willing to give it four episodes to warm up before leveling criticism

Ha ha, yeah. I'm assuming it's going to be good for some reason. Probably should temper my expectations a bit.

hate the comic, but this seems like it'll be a big improvement

I also hate the comic but somehow feel this will be good also.

also HATE the comic but am anticipating this

Why do people hate the comic but expect this to be good? Should I not even ask?

Like, what is it that's crap about the comic but makes you think this will be good telly?

was going to ask

i like the comic actually; not sure why everyone's agin it.
But i read the first fifty-five issues in one sitting, so...

55 issues? I assumed it was a limited run kind of thing. Is it still going? Would it provide enough material for several seasons worth of stories? I don't really want to wikipedia it in case of spoilers.

I really meant to ask, "does it end?" as in "is this series going to be 5 or so seasons of awesome shit all heading towards a conclusion or is it just going to dither on and on?"

The comic's up to 76 or so issues now, and is intended to be open-ended.

walking dead comics r good, tv show might be okay if made well. one of the great things about the comic was the level of ongoing tension, even if the immediate conflict did not involve da scary zombies. it is a dark future.

one of the great things about the book is that it's continuously in motion. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that no one is safe; major characters die regularly. Stories don't settle into any one setting for too very long.

and yeah, there's enough material for five seasons, easy. Kirkman more or less wrote them in "seasons" anyway; his stuff is very storyboardy.

still, very curious to see how closely this hews to the comic. Anybody know what the word is on Kirkman's involvement/faithfulness to the comic storyline?

didn't find the comic particularly amazing, just seemed very standard zombie storyline. artwork was average, i thought. later eps were improved though.

have no idea what the tv series will be like, but i don't recall any other zombie tv/series other than the big brother feature (which i liked), so this might be rather refreshing as opposed to yet another full on zombie flick.

The admittedly small number of issues I read didn't seem to either add anything significant to zombie mythology or have particularly interesting characters.

But I will certainly watch the first couple of eps at least.

I read thar his rationale is not so much to add to the mythology (originally it was going to be set in the public domain world of Romero's first Dead film) as to fill in the viewer's desire to know what happens NEXT, and then NEXT, and then NEXT--how peoploe keep on living in the world post-zombie apocalypse, as opposed to the few days/weeks that a film can show.

zombie apocalypse is a great canvas for right wing/nra/libertarian types to express their i-told-you-so-liberal-faggits wish fullment on and i thought the books veered close to this territory too often for my reading comfort.

I really meant to ask, "does it end?" as in "is this series going to be 5 or so seasons of awesome shit all heading towards a conclusion or is it just going to dither on and on?"

This is my fear about the show as well...I know the comic goes on forever, shows like this don't seem to work when they are completely open ended and aren't headed towards any type of conclusion.

Well, what makes the comic (and in turn the show) so risky is that there is no conclusion to head toward. Most of the planet is dead or undead. What resolution could possibly occur? The only thing I can think of is some sort of "the children offer hope for the future" ending, because what else can they do?

Why do people hate the comic but expect this to be good? Should I not even ask?

because i'm pretty sure kirkman has no idea how human relationships work, and everything reads like teenage melodrama. any writer would be an improvement.

also torture porn

yyyyyeah, that sequence is not cool.

that must have been after i stopped reading (which was, i don't know, somewhere in the 20s?)

You talking about Michonne and The Governor?

i presume. that's like season two or three material though, really.

I haven't read the comic (but there are pretty convincing criticisms itt) but we bought the iTunes season pass for the show ($10 - cheap!) and I'm excited. The trailer looks pretty creepy.

i liked the first few books i guess

but the trailer for this looked pretty shitty dudes

No, it looked creepy. Didn't you read what I just posted?

oh shit - sorry

np

yeah the trailer was promising

what an embarrassment for slocki

it will be an embarrassment for YOU when the show comes out and is lame

then everyone will be like oh sorry slocki and i will be like whatever and just walk right by you w/o even making eye contact

hahaha

that will be because you are a zombie.

ya, because i made myself a real zombie because the tv version was so lame

Gnawing out your own brains in protest at terrible television is the new "I'm mad as hell and..."

fill in the viewer's desire to know what happens NEXT, and then NEXT, and then NEXT--how peoploe keep on living in the world post-zombie apocalypse, as opposed to the few days/weeks that a film can show.

If it does this at all well, then I will love it. I am fascinated by just how people are supposed to get by and live their lives under extreme circumstances, and the accommodations they have to make in order to have any order at all. What kind of barter springs up? What turns out to be useful? That kind of thing.

http://io9.com/5667199/spoiler+free-review-of-the-first-two-episodes-of-the-walking-dead

early fanboy reviews are worthless.

LOL

the LOLing dead

I would prob watch that, too.

Leaked

Zombies have an unfortunate tendency to do that.

watching THE COLONY, discovery channel's "survivor: apocalypse" reality show, and i keep expecting zombies to stagger around the corner

whoa ep one of this was absolutely fantastic...blown away.

Don't raise my expectations please. OK? Thanks!

First ep was pretty solid IMO, they get the "origin" shit over and done without too much trouble while throwing in a few nice details. Closing song is pretty WTF though.

yeah, just watched this. surprisingly fucking good tbqh.

Yeah sorry to raise expectations! Basically I felt it was v good dramatically, v tense, managed to make the events feel sad/disturbing, and looked great. The zombies behave and look far far better than say 28 Days Later.

Ladies just can't learn to turn off a damn light or not to take sentimental mementos instead of survival supplies, amirite?

What I expected, especially after watching the 4 minute episode 1 preview
but I liked it all the same.

Here's hoping this series is a long good zombie movie

This was v v satisfying
also, my girlfriend tends to leave the lights on
and she spent large chunks of this telling me when she could look

Very well done. Nothing surprising or new, but the sniping the wife/killing the crawling torso scene was great.

Also, I'm totally going to judge rural deputy sheriffs for having backward views on women. Turning it off in disgust.

And yeah, women be grabbin' the photo albums. It's The Simpsons Movie all over again.

xp, lol, people getting scared to horror

It was okay, not particularly mind blowing. Hopefully there will be enough deviation from the comics that I won't have a sense of having seen this all before.

Loved it. Though honestly, Sheriff Egg have you watched no zombie movies? Sheesh. DONT GO INTO THE CITY. (Sherriff was Egg in 'This Life' in the longago...hence Sheriff Egg)

Had long nerd discussion with Mr Veg over car vs horse in zombieworld...I was pro horse, well until I remembered the whole lunch on legs thing, doh.

Greg Nicotero special effects ftw.

That little girl headshot in the opening scene was Assault on Precinct 13-level cold-bloodedness.
I approve.

I assume that the horse was previously able to run away from danger?

Anyway, this show rules.

haven't read the comics. the story was pretty meat and potatoes, but i thought this was executed wonderfully. very atmospheric. definitely was way more into this than anything zombie-related i've seen in years. altogether a very solid pilot.

few issues: 1. yeah, that song at the end. 2. guy at the farmhouse who for some reason decided to write GOD FORGIVE US on the wall with blood of the wife he just shot?

Driving home from my friend's house through empty streets was fun.

How long was Rick in a coma? Wouldn't it take a while for zombies to overtake the world, since they are not a particularly fast moving bunch? Maybe this is answered in the comic, but I was just curious.

maybe europe is fine

liked it, but still worried it's going to fellow the comic's descent into melodrama

oh most definitely
writing is not mad men/breaking bad level at all
but melodrama is the fuel this thing runs on

One would hope, having the spine of a larger story from the comic book, they can work out how to improve on its faults. Of course, I don't know about Darabont's chops in this regard. I worry that HOLLYWOOD names dazzle execs into not questioning the showrunning skills.

Anyways, if it stays a quality piece of genre and nothing more, it would be a shame but I'd be alright with that.

the comic's rhythm was long periods of being off-balance, then an island of calm for about half as long, then everybody loses everything and a few people die and we're off balance and on the move again, then an island of calm
repeat ad nauseum.
if the show can do this without turning into zombie groundhog day and always keep the stakes high (and if that kid can act; that kid has GOT to be able to act) this should be able to hold my attention for as long as it takes for michonne to show up and for this to become the action movie I assume it's ultimately aiming for

Simply must download this tonight. I'm totally geeked for this.

this was great. things I liked the best: letting the main character be totally vulnerable/scared shitless. sympathy for zombies. lols at zombies. the loyal horse companion. only thing I didn't: the wife side story.

i agree it's not really on the level of mad men or breaking bad, but hard to imagine how this plot would hit those levels anyway. i just think it's dramatically really exciting, and so i can imagine v easily looking forward to it each week.

happy to hear this from the A/V club review:
"It's been made clear that it will feature new characters that don't appear in the book, eliminate ones that do, and follow the plots and stories of the comic only insofar as it suits the arc of the series."

Yeah, cutting to the wife and that scrappy band of survivors was a bit jarring considering the mood that was set before. It had to happen, I guess, but that "twist" was pretty cliché. xxpost

Zombie and apocalypse drama is a pretty rich vein for really great drama. I'd like to see it do something more than just AAGH ZOMBIES and hopefully avoid the "WE are the real enemy" as much as possible.

From the preview I saw ages ago, I remember thinking that little girl ran, so I was happy to see she just moved a little briskly. Slow zombies>>>>>>>>>>>Fast zombies.

How long was Rick in a coma? Wouldn't it take a while for zombies to overtake the world,

When they're taking showers at the police station, Morgan says, "The gas lines have been off for a couple of months."

He would have been in a coma for a while before that happened though, since everything was fine when he got shot.

That crawling half-zombie was O_O

Haven't seen this yet but have read the comix, and hoping they cut out the psycho armchair ninja lady with a sword. Clearly they like her, because she's lasted this long in the books, but she always struck me as more than a little ridiculous (see also: blind guy vs. zombies in "World War Z").

That crawling half-zombie was O_O

I was feeling for that poor zombie, it was way more sad than scary.

Scary first time around, sad when he shot it..special effects makeup etc on it were A+++

the zombies look and act in a way that's a lot more interesting than lots of other zombie tv/films

Yeah, there's a remnant of their living selves still in their faces/behavior somehow, I really like it

Also like the violence of the zombie killings...pretty impressive for basic cable. The one scene where the sheriff blew away the deputy guy up against the chainlink gate..wow

yeah it's v full on. and i agree yeah, it's weird how they sort of seem still human somehow, moreso than i dunno, something like 28 days later.

They really played up that human remnant with Morgan's wife. Nothing malevolent in her face at all, just confusion and a weird tinge of sadness. They also (thankfully) never went for the clichéd "she seems so human" and then WHAM she attacks.

It helped that the wife really didn't look very zombiefied...just kind of drugged/out of it.

How long was Rick in a coma? Wouldn't it take a while for zombies to overtake the world,

When they're taking showers at the police station, Morgan says, "The gas lines have been off for a couple of months."

― Tub Girl Time Machine (Phil D.), Monday, 1 November 2010 15:09 (1 hour ago)

actually says "for maybe a month".

yeah nicole otm, i couldn't help but think of drugs/alcoholism or something with that whole "she looks like herself but isn't" vibe.

She kinda looks like Michael's crackhead mom from The Wire.

Was that Tara's mom from True Blood?

i gotta say the standards for tv-14 are getting stretched to the limit here imo

Don't understand how they got away with some of this stuff but edited the Friday the 13th movies down so much.

How long was Rick in a coma?

my guess is probably 28 days?

kinda surprised at the positive reactions here. maybe I've seen too many innovative zombie flicks in the past year (and there have been a bunch recently) but the walking dead didn't bring one new thing to the table. every aspect of the zombies seem to be lifted from romero, coma guy waking up to the apocalypse is from 28 days later, even the "living with your loved ones as zombies" stuff is in the dawn of the dead remake.

I guess all that wouldn't matter as much if the characters were interesting, or the script was on point, but everything seemed workmanlike and perfunctory. my wife's verdict at the halfway point was "this is neither interesting nor scary". then she fell asleep.

the sexism in the opening scene was kinda o_O. you can say, hey they're smalltown cops, but guess what, smalltown cops tend to be kinda racist, too. and later the same character has to talk some sense into a hysterical women, so it seems like the show's totally down with lol dumb broads...

coma guy waking up to the apocalypse is from 28 days later Day of the Triffids "28 Days Later" didn't exactly invent this gambit.

The opening scene, IMO, was just a clumsy setup for some misdirection. (At least for those who are watching this without having read the comics.) Shane talks about his arguments with his wife, then later on you see him arguing with this woman and figure, "Hey, at least he got away with his family," then they show LOL IT WAS RICK'S WIFE ALL ALONG U N00BZ!

I guess my expectations were lower? I'm happy to watch a series-long version of boilerplate zombie tropes.

Zombies are zombies...the tropes are tropes bc they're zombies, it's not like they can be not undead. It's how they are used, it's only 1 episode and so far its creepy, bloody and interesting enough to keep me interested

true, and if the walking dead borrowed from a semi-obscure 60s monster movie I'd be more forgiving, but it's borrowing from one of the most famous zombie films of the past decade so

xxp

i think romero-style zombies are a generic, public domain archetype at this point.

exactly

"so it seems like the show's totally down with lol dumb broads..."

well, the show is making the male chauvinist police partner out to be a bad guy so there's that.

the main character doesn't seem like a male chauvinist so much as he seems like a semi-flawed human that has adapted to the behavior/bigotry of his partner to the point where he can laugh at the sexist remarks put forth in the women rant (during the exorcist metaphor). the main character admits his lady problems but refrains from making any sexist remarks. instead he opens up about how he felt when his wife said "you don't care about us" in front of the kid. I think that because his partner is a sexist small town cop, the main character can be open about his relationship problems - which actually feels therapeutic whenever he feels silenced by his wife. and when his partner says that main character is having "problems that every couple goes through" - this is just more therapeutic chit-chat

I wasn't offended by how the main character acted (he wasn't perfect but who is). the main character is flawed and at the same time he tries to explain that he is trying to make the marriage work and that his wife isn't the kind of person that "leaves the switch on"

Regarding the "28 Days Later" opening, Kirkman:

"I saw 28 Days Later shortly before the first issue of Walking Dead was released. That first issue came out in October of 2003 and 28 Days Later was released in the States in June of 2003. So we were working on our second issue by the time I saw it. Yeah. It was a little annoying. But great minds think alike, right"

and when his partner says that main character is having "problems that every couple goes through" - this is just more therapeutic chit-chat

i just assumed the partner and dude's wife were already sleeping together at this point

The ratings were very very strong, btw.

Zombies are zombies...the tropes are tropes bc they're zombies, it's not like they can be not undead.

this is the type of thinking that produces a boring zombie movie! I dunno, we were talking about this on the post-2005 horror thread, the genre is getting tired, especially when movies like pontypool, deadgirl, les revanants, the signal, and the end of the line have shown there are still interesting places to take the zombie/apocalypse film.

I was hoping that if AMC took the trouble of mounting an entire TV series with a name hollywood director, they might stretch the borders of the zombie genre or at least present some new angle, but instead it comes off as a by-the-numbers derivative. which wouldn't mean much if it had some striking, memorable characters or was scripted with flair, but this thing is so damn flat and earnest.

5.3 million. RIP Rubicon.

and I'm not saying "romero should sue!"

more like come up with an interesting angle, even the dawn of the dead remake had better tricks up its sleeve

Maybe they will introduce some new ideas in one of the many other episodes.

Poly otm. Don't think you can bury the series for it's failure to burst through the zombie genre on the back of one episode. And why can't it be a good story within the confines of the genre...seeing it before doesn't mean you've seen *this* before. I get the criticism I just think it's premature

and I'm not saying "romero should sue!"

If it weren't for Romero, "Plants vs. Zombies" would be called "Lawn of the Dead", which is obviously much more awesome.

the main character doesn't seem like a male chauvinist so much as he seems like a semi-flawed human that has adapted to the behavior/bigotry of his partner to the point where he can laugh at the sexist remarks put forth in the women rant (during the exorcist metaphor). the main character admits his lady problems but refrains from making any sexist remarks. instead he opens up about how he felt when his wife said "you don't care about us" in front of the kid. I think that because his partner is a sexist small town cop, the main character can be open about his relationship problems - which actually feels therapeutic whenever he feels silenced by his wife. and when his partner says that main character is having "problems that every couple goes through" - this is just more therapeutic chit-chat

But that led to the worst of the dialogue there, which was that he says that the true difference between men and women is that he could never say anything that hurtful to his wife, much less in front of his kid. Women be heartless.

I think we're putting too much emphasis on the "difference between men and women" line tbh.

maybe the character is sexist.

I look forward to the denunciation in the Guardian.

One of the many reviews of this I read noted how different it would be if for once the characters were presented with the zombiepocalpse and sort of knew what was going on. Learning and going over "the rules" every time (and this goes for vampires, werewolves, etc., too) seems to be a structural must at this point, but all these monsters are such templates that the expected audience has gotta know, right? "Aim for the head!" etc. The zombie genre's kind of ripe for a self-aware deconstruction, which we've never really seen before.

"Zombieland" was kind of like that

i see what you mean, but the 28-x movies were already kind of deconstructive -- "omfg, they're RUNNING!!" -- so maybe some uhh zombie classicism is in order

i only saw parts of this but i thought it was ok enough.

I like how they didn't say zombie once the entire episode

That's kind of a zombie movie rule, you're not allowed to say zombie.

x-post to Melissa, my friend and I were texting during the show and he groaned that there was some "Men are from Mars" content there. There were a few mildly redeeming moments regarding that dynamic, but I thought that conversation was as cringe-worthy as relationship material on television gets.

Now I remember the corresponding bit: the father character was saying that his wife was clinging to impractical things like photo albums instead of putting together clothes and gear, but later in the episode, he's sitting and crying over photos.

I think it's a heavy-handed "men emote differently, yet as complexly, as women" point they were going for, but it was dickish.

the only question that matters is are they believable as characters. it's a tv show, not a sermon from deep into our future utopia.

the only question that matters is whether or not I care if he gets eaten by a zombie.

speak for yourself.

None of the characters really make me want to cheer them on, tbh

not fussed in 'emotional investment' if 'larger themes' about 'the human condition' are tackled.

also gore :D

I just want a tv show about zombies to be a tv show about zombies. I dont want it to be Beckett. (Though that would be cool if it was)

x-post "Return of the Living Dead" was kind of deconstructive, in that it takes place in a universe where the characters have seen "Night of the Living Dead" and sort of know the drill, except that the "real" zombies deviate from said "fictional" account of a real zombie outbreak. But zombie flicks I suppose aren't ultimately that different from superhero flicks and their redundant origin myths. None of these things ever "end," per se, so the movies inevitably focus on the beginning.

Be funny if there were a show/movie that started out almost entirely from the zombie perspective, and just went on for, like, an hour before the scared and scarred survivors made an appearance.

I just want to watch characters that I don't want to die try not to die.

sometimes watching characters you want to die think they aren't going to die, but then die, is more fun

maybe the main character will become more likable in the next few episodes

Maybe he gets hip to bell hooks.

Be funny if there were a show/movie that started out almost entirely from the zombie perspective, and just went on for, like, an hour before the scared and scarred survivors made an appearance.

― Josh in Chicago, Monday, November 1, 2010 5:50 PM (54 minutes ago)

hey, I was just thinking the same thing after talking about zombies in the 1977 horror poll! a zombie movie completely from a zombie's POV.

Funny you should mention it.

So what’s the movie about? It’s about a regular joe named Colin (Alastair Kirton) who, at the start of the movie, has just received a zombie bite. He wards off his already-zombified roommate (Leigh Crocombe) and descends into zombiehood overnight. By morning, he’s a stiff and shuffling corpse, emptied of all but the most rudimentary intelligence, and he goes out wandering aimlessly.

prejudging prejudices itt

Aside from the special effects this completely sucks. Horrible acting, characters you couldn't possibly give a shit about... it felt like a bad Stephen King adaptation mini-series. Having read and hated a few of the books I can only assume it's going to get ever more corny, melodramatic and godawful.

The zombie genre's kind of ripe for a self-aware deconstruction, which we've never really seen before.
― Josh in Chicago, Monday, November 1, 2010 8:34 PM (1 hour ago)

Shaun Of The Dead does this wonderfully.

ya i just watched shaun of the dead last night and then this... and tho it's not fair to compare, one thing "shaun" did really well was fuckin' around with the cinematic action/horror movie tropes/ideas/expectations. like way more than you'd expect any comedy to do. this show, from a 'cinematic' point of view is totally fuckin' dead in the water, with the one notable exception of that very nice and creepy crawling in the grass scene. like every time you see zombies en masse it's all oooh shakey cam... and that fuckin' blurry slow-mo when the gun goes off in the tank... or when he's about to shoot himself and then notices the open hatch, that didn't play AT ALL... it just felt super-super-TV

hatch/gun bit didn't play, you're right. didn't think there was much super-shakey cam though.

I didn't notice shaky cam either, and that's usually a big peeve of mine.

I don't see the problem with it being "tv" though?

i just mean it reminds of cheap vancouvery crappy syndicated sci-fi shows

shakey mo camollier was most evident in "POV in hospital bed" scene and "gunshot in tank" scene. but also all the shots of the crowds of zombies were very hand-held "freaky" style which i find lame

I thought the first episode was cinematic *enough* to feel a little different to other current tv shows. How cinematic does it have to be? Is the zombie thing creating a heightened expectation, or Darabont, or what? I don't get how it could be so disappointing when it pretty much is what it says its going to be.
Not trying to be a shit-stirrer, just surprised by some of the reactions

i don't think it wasnt cinematic enough, i just think that it was not very well-directed from a cinematic point-of-view. i dont want pyrotechnics but the sorta cheap foursquareness of it was disappointing

also i didnt like the big emotional shooting his wife scene... we havent spent nearly enough time with these dudes to get away with such major melodramatics

also main dude is kinda boring & i fear for the show because of that. can't think of one good show where the lead didnt grap me from the first ep

I know what you mean about the main dude...but I think having super-awesome dude *and* zombies *and* end of the world, it could get a bit too Snake Plisskin. Normal dude trying to get his head around crazy problems is a good way to ease ppl into that world. Hopefully he'll start to embrace butt kicking & bring a bit more Raylan Givens to the party. But yeah, he's a bit robo-Sherriff right now.

ya i dont necc mean he's not BADASS enough - he's just not grabbing me as a screen presence nahmean?

^ exactly what I thought from the moment he was first onscreen. said to my gf something like "this isn't the lead is it? I don't want to hang out with this guy at all!"

he's a bit blank, yeah.

also i didnt think that first scene was indicative of like any wild sexism, just really boring character-building

the title might actually be a reference to the lead character

ayooooooooo

i hope when he meets his deputy buddy and finds the dude's boning his wife he's all 'hey it's cool i used to be into my best bro's wife so i know where you're at man'

Hahah

Perving on Keira Knightley

agreed. this was an okay first episode, but i enjoyed reading TWD more than watching it. i think truly innovative TV dramas like 'Breaking Bad' and 'Lone Star' (R.I.P.) have spoiled me for a show with such a conventional narrative style. TWD impressed me as more compelling than innovative, and the series seems to be following suit. i understand that it won't be following the book all that closely, so i'll probably keep tuning in to see if it develops into its own entity. as noted, the staging isn't much better than Garris' hackwork on any SK miniseries, but the sound design and FX work are quite impressive - for TV or otherwise.

how can you have already written this off after 1 episode? 1st ep of Breaking Bad wasn't that great, and Lone Star mostly just showed potential.

one thing i liked about this was how it generally refrained from super quick cuts and jerking the camera around, so i'm not really getting the TOO MUCH SHAKY CAM angle. they used it when guy was mobbed and his horse fell over, but that was kind of it. the camera is stationary in that hospital scene. i guess the 5 seconds of the camera swaying when guy fires his pistol in the tank kind of count, but it's not exactly used egregiously here.

xpsts

this was only really interesting when no1 was talking

we havent spent nearly enough time with these dudes to get away with such major melodramatics

this was my problem with the comic, unearned melodrama.

are you kidding?! Breaking Bad hit the ground running. so did Lone Star. in both cases, these shows grabbed me from the proverbial get-go and announced that they were something special. unfortunately, i can only imagine what would have become of LS, but BB has repaid that investment of good faith at least fifty-fold. with TWD, knowing Kirkman's book, i see all the same shortcomings, often amplified. the forced melodramatics, the languid/hectic pacing, the bland lead character. it's that much worse writ large (small?) on screen.

sort of a minor nit to pick, but after they've spent the entire episode shooting guns without ear protection, including a hunting rifle in a bedroom - only when he shoots the guy in the tank does it hurt him?
I'm fine with the movie convention of gunfire not hurting, but keep it consistent.

Breaking Bad had an alright first season, but it spent most of the time finding it's footing and feeling out what kind of show it wanted to be. First episode was fine but not amazing. It didn't really hit it's stride until season 2.

eh, maybe. but it didn't take two seasons for BB to establish itself as a true original. i'm less optimistic about TWD. believe me, i've read or watched every zombie/survival variant there is, and TWD does not do enough to break away from the very large pack. when it tries, as when the characters of Michonne and The General are introduced (and interact), it usually just comes off as juvenile.

I don't see anything in the pilot that makes me think that TWD will be one of the greats either, but I also didn't in the pilot of BB. This show is hampered by a genre, which means if it is better than 'what it is' it will take longer. Any decent pilot deserves at least 5 episodes imo.

bb first ep was amazing

sort of a minor nit to pick, but after they've spent the entire episode shooting guns without ear protection, including a hunting rifle in a bedroom - only when he shoots the guy in the tank does it hurt him?

i would think firing a weapon inside of a small metal box would amplify the sound significantly.

also i didnt think that first scene was indicative of like any wild sexism, just really boring character-building

It's rather more worrying if it wasn't meant to indicate sexism on the part of the character? If the writer just thought that was character-building, that's...troublesome. Rather have Rick and sidekick turn out to be card-carrying misogynists than have writers who think that that conversation was totally normal and not fucked up at all.

Rick could have said all that shit he said about his wife without tarring half the human race with the same brush, I mean.

I really think it's bad writing tbh. Deputy Dude tries bro down with his bud with classic "what's the deal with women and the lights, ya know?" chat and then Rick turns the previous joviality into a serious statement by using the clunky 'women/men divide' device. I don't think it's coded misogyny or anything.

main dude is kinda boring

Yeah I actually like this a lot but I have to agree. Really needed someone with a bit more character. Can we cancel Hung so Tom Jane can take it over?

I always though the dialogue of the books was pretty corny, in a 17-year old "heavy" sort of way. Immature is the wrong word for it, but it just doesn't feel terribly adult. So maybe the disconnect ports to the show?

x-post As savvy as "Shaun of the Dead" was, it was hardly a deconstruction of the genre. It was clever and fun from an audience perspective, yeah, but the characters live in a universe where apparently zombie movies and their tropes don't exist. That's cool, though. "Shaun of the Dead" is brilliant all the same.

Just finished "Dead Set" and thought it a pretty impressive recasting of the "Day of the Dead" scenario. Pretty viciously gory, too, and perhaps the only show/film of its kind to deal with the practicalities of where/when the characters will go to the bathroom. It's got fast, mean zombies, for those who care, but I didn't mind. The (inevitable?) pessimistic ending made me consider that "World War Z" may be the only zombiepocalypse story that actually sees the crisis through.

I don't think it's coded misogyny or anything.

Wasn't arguing that there was anything coded about it.

ok then there's nothing overtly misogynist about it.

also, Nick Frost does say "Zombies" in Shaun and then is quickly shushed and told not to use the "Z" word.

It turns out I have read the comic (when the show cut to the camp, I was like "Whoa, why is this so familiar?" Duh), and stopped after the first trade because I hated the way all the female characters were written.

So here's hoping somebody gets hip to bell hooks, though I'd settle for Camille Paglia, even. I just remember the book being really reactionary. (NB it's been four or five years since I read it.)

Extremely well-done, for what it is. What it is is a comic book.

And please let's not have the Mad Men argument again. I'm perfectly able to sympathize and even empathize with characters who are not perfect.

Well done... for a comic book?

If you're trying to say that comic books generally aren't done well, I assure you there are tons of them that are way way better than The Walking Dead.

Don't get me wrong. I know there's better, and that comics are a format and not a genre, and etc. But out of what tends to be adapted to moving pictures, this is on the top shelf, imo.

Plus, I have come to expect a bit of material that offends even me from comics.

Rick could have said all that shit he said about his wife without tarring half the human race with the same brush, I mean.

UN report declares a quarter of the worlds women never, ever put out the dung fire.

I'm perfectly able to sympathize and even empathize with characters who are not perfect a bunch of wooden drips

these guys' biggest character flaw is terminal blanditude

I'm just saying, let's not go nuts focusing on the sexism. Not about this. It's mild at worst, and probably irrelevant altogether given the context.

Call me a cad, but I'm far more worried about the facts that: 1) the lead actor is not a very good actor, and 2) the violence and gore is some of the best I've ever seen, and easily the best I've ever seen on television.

Yay! Yes! this! ^^^^

agree the effects are awesome

here's a time lapse of bicycle girl getting done up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa0tRQ2Q0Wk

x-post As savvy as "Shaun of the Dead" was, it was hardly a deconstruction of the genre. It was clever and fun from an audience perspective, yeah, but the characters live in a universe where apparently zombie movies and their tropes don't exist. That's cool, though. "Shaun of the Dead" is brilliant all the same.

i cannot even imagine how you would think this. how is that movie anything but an overt and joyful deconstruction of the genre? i mean if "shaun" doesn't qualify what does??

also i can't beleive an entire argument has evolved from that lame stand-up routine "women be like THIS and guys be like THIS" scene

Whoa, that video was coooool. Props to that chick, all that makeup & latex & sitting around for hours, crikey.
<3 Nicotero for all time.

Wasn't the comic book a little more oblique about wifey and best friend hooking up, revealing it further on, after he's in their camp?

Careful not to spoil, plz.

1) the lead actor is not a very good actor

fuck this! this guy has 20 years experience of being a terrific tv lead. problem is that its cunty ooooh crying men films frank darabont in charge. if they gave it to someone like marti noxon (of buffy/mad men fame) this would be AWESOME.

also we're only one episode in. and we've had to establish the basic outline as well as the zombie world. accent isn't great though.

instead it was a 'eh, kinda ok i guess. will download the next couple episodes but if it doesn't hook me then after that i'll forget it ever existed' pilot.

Yeah accent wasn't great.

of course i've heard such a wide variety of batshit ridiculous southern accents in my day that they don't really bother me. i remember everyone crowing about how bad Ewan MacGregor's was in Big Fish but I've met old guys that talk just like that so I'm pretty forgiving.

problem is that its cunty ooooh crying men films frank darabont in charge. if they gave it to someone like marti noxon (of buffy/mad men fame) this would be AWESOME.

You could have a point. I think he's going to be fine in the long run, and the "ooooh crying men" bits of the pilot didn't work for anyone who tried them.

this season is only 6 episodes so I don't see the harm in seeing it through.

oh ok, never knew it was british tv short, will stick with it.

Visually, I thought the pilot was very well directed. Loved the way he could generate tension just by dollying behind a tree, just a little bit too slowly.

The scene where the sheriff zombie gets shot, and the camera is locked, from the headshot through him falling out of frame. Nice.

I loved the hands trying to grab onto the fence in that scene.

Yes!

Some of the visual effects were cheesy/bad CGI - the back of zombies heads exploding, etc..

Oh come on

That's kind of the norm in tv and film these days though.

really, didn't hurt The Departed.

or Zodiac etc etc etc

It's not the idea of the explosive gore that bothered me, but the execution - the actual effects were badly done, IMO - the chunks of skull you can see and the way they move just looked fake. Reminded me of some of the crappier effects in The Mist, actually.

Really?

If it follows the plot of the comics at all then we have a lot more "ooooh crying men" bits to look forward to.

If that's what you think then cool but damn this thread feels like it's getting really challops-y really quickly.

I thought the effects and the directing were the high notes of the show, a show which I pretty much enjoyed all round. Zombies! A tv show about zombies! That's pretty freaking good! It's like Christmas up in here and you're all complaining about the quality of the wrapping paper! Agh!

You're bumming me out, guys.

Sorry.

Pro tip: Ignore these assholes! :-)

"The exploding heads looked so fake! And believe me, I've seen dozens of heads explode in my day, lemme tell you whut,"

gore was great throughout! dunno what anyone's complaining about in that regard. loved the bike girl, various shamblers & gnawed corpses, slo-mo headshots, etc. little girl zombie getting wasted in the intro knocked me for a loop. very pleased that it stuck to traditional zombie flick values in that regard. effectively suspenseful and sometimes even scary ("DON'T OPEN DEAD INSIDE"), with tight but leisurely direction/editing and decent character building.

didn't love it though. felt like a setup for a long, tiresome melodrama about characters i didn't much like (two male leads, especially) more than a proper horror flick. and i kept wanting to quibble about trivialities - a sign of at least partial disengagement. why was the blood splattered around inside the hospital still fresh red, and not dry brown? why were the hospital interiors appropriate to a modern hospital, while the exterior seemed to be an ancient and poorly maintained industrial building? and how does mere "infection" allow the continued mobility of something as annihilated as bike girl?

geek minutia aside, the gender dynamics bothered me, too. not a lot, but at least a little. okay, so it's just gross guy talk at the beginning, fine. but throughout the episode, women were badmouthed, absent, or bossed around. post-apocalyptic sci-fi often seems to revel in the "naturally ordained" real-man's world that will supposedly emerge when civilization collapses, and TWD at least flirts with that. then again, it's just a first episode. be interesting to see how things shake out.

I think your last paragraph is what I was (perhaps inarticulately) trying to get at.

I was more struck by the dynamic in the tent btwn best friend and wife than in the first scene.

^^^ agreed. "you are my woman, and no matter what silly ideas you get in your head, you're going to abide by the rules i set for your own good."

"okay. luv you."

I'm guessing that where this is going is that the dude's a huge dick. Good guys don't bang your wife.

i'm guessing he's proved many times how to keep her the fuck alive in a world ruled by KILLER ZOMBIES

well he is a police officer, he's trained to fire weapons etc. that more than his gender suggests he prob is pretty good to take orders from. even if he is obv a total dick.

Loved the show. This thread is going to suck though

already does

otm

http://knowyourmeme.com/i/000/052/812/original/Deal_with_it_dog_gif.gif?1275684729

here's a zombie question i got for ya. this applies to pretty much every movie or whatever i've seen about them.

if when zombies sense people their impulse is to head over and eat them and tear them apart until there's nothing left, where do new zombies come from?

community sort of addressed that last week when the zombies bit troy and he was all like "okay, you bit me, i get it, that's what zombies do" and shrugged them off

and how does mere "infection" allow the continued mobility of something as annihilated as bike girl?

this criticism is bullshit though. THATS WHAT HAPPENS IN ZOMBIE MOVIES.

Nothing but a head shot kills a zombie. Who doesn't already know this?

a lot of people in atlanta iirc

isn't it a case of

Secluded cases ppl think is illness > biting fam but overpowerable (that's not a word surely) so not a case of absolute death > people in the street able to escape the slow/stupid zombies with just a bite/scratch > fuck loads of zombies then can wile out on anyone > end times

never thought there would be a case of new gen of zombies in any zombie story i've ever seen, always ends with end times. also while that was obviously a lot of people in atlanta at the end, it wasn't exactly a whole fucking city of people, most people are dead.

ya i guess a lot of them are bite-and-runs

Both of these links are U+K.

http://www.cracked.com/article_15643_5-scientific-reasons-zombie-apocalypse-could-actually-happen.html
http://www.cracked.com/article_18683_7-scientific-reasons-zombie-outbreak-would-fail-quickly.html

thought the show was fantastic. loved it.

get out

felt it failed to highlight the current crisis facing burma

What about elephants
Have we lost their trust

the reality today is that 33 per cent more horses die year on year due to showjumping/flatracing injuries than being rended limb from limb by a gigantic crowd of zombies. now call me cynical, but i doubt this show will ever mention that stat.

I for one am disgusted by the show's blatant anti-horse agenda.

show is speciesist

a horse uses an immeasurable amount less gas than a military tank, and can later be recycled as food for zombies. and yet this show sends out the message, bold as brass, jump in your gas guzzling tank, you'll be safe there!

It was incredibly speciesist to portray horses as being so easily spooked by zombies. I'll bet none of the writers are even horses, let alone horse riders.

Are we on for a zombie horse next ep d'y think?

no doubt it won't be a stallion

and how does mere "infection" allow the continued mobility of something as annihilated as bike girl?

this criticism is bullshit though. THATS WHAT HAPPENS IN ZOMBIE MOVIES.

― candid gamera (s1ocki), Tuesday, November 2, 2010 8:40 AM (58 minutes ago) Bookmark

think you're missing contenderizer's point here, he's not criticizing the show for lack of scientific veracity when it comes to zombie infection, he's criticizing it for being so slow and disengaging that he started questioning stupid stuff. which I understand, because I had the exact same reaction. I was like, why aren't there a fuckton of zombie dogs, pigs, and horses running around?

Same reason we don't get feline leukemia.

actually, has there been a zombie animal movie?

(Resident Evil doesn't count; that had zombie humans as well)

Does the crazy deer head in "Evil Dead 2" count?

Oh I dunno, never saw that

Oh Dan

Pet Semetary, sort of.

There are reanimated animal, er, parts in "Return of the Living Dead." Zombie dogs in "Resident Evil?" The game, at least.

x-post The Romero rules more or less state the virus (or whatever) affects the dead or newly dead, so that means thousands of people who die every day - 250,000? - plus recently buried. So figure the initial outbreak contends with some 500,000 zombies, which is a big enough vector to spread around the world pretty quickly via zombie bite. Now, if the question is, how do the zombie multiply if they eat their victims, then that's a sort of good question. But in all these movies and shows and books and stuff, we're never given a zombie count. It's just always "a lot," and certainly more than there are people. But then you do the math and think, jeez, how many zombies does it take to take out 6 billion people (give or take a few)? So the total zombie count has to be massive.

x-xpost Just because "Shaun of the Dead" is funny does not make it a deconstruction. Gags and in-jokes aside, It's more of a loving homage, since regardless it hones pretty close to "the rules." It's not like vampires showing up in broad daylight and saying "oh, those are silly myths" The zombies eat people, get killed via the brain, shamble, bite, transfer the virus, etc. Nothing wrong with that, but like the mentioned earlier, the characters are not aware of Romero's world in their particular world. It's fun, funny stuff, but it still shows the zombie survivor learning curve in effect.

"Hot Fuzz," FWIW, it's possibly more of a deconstruction, since it ironically sets OTT Michael Bay antics (the characters even watch "Bad Boys 2") in a mundane small town.

OK, back on topic: zombies. They eat people.

thought dans post read "zombie anal movie".

noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

But in all these movies and shows and books and stuff, we're never given a zombie count.

The only thing I've seen that's close is in Day Of The Dead, when the doctor estimates the then-current zombie-to-human ratio at 400:1.

thought dans post read "zombie anal movie".

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/59/Ottoor.jpg

noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I knew there had to be at least one.

it paints homosexuals in a bad light.

as zombies.

well if you want hetero

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/deadgirl-dvd.jpg

i think that was my first wife amirite!!111

New DTV flick Horno has venereal zombieism, spread through sodomy, plaguing a (het) porn shoot. It's absolutely terrible.

http://mmomfg.com/wp-content/gallery/rdrundead_09292010/undeadnightmare4.jpg

^^^want to play, haven't gotten yet

Nothing wrong with that, but like the mentioned earlier, the characters are not aware of Romero's world in their particular world. It's fun, funny stuff, but it still shows the zombie survivor learning curve in effect.

dont see why the characters need to have seen romero movies for the movie to be a genre deconstruction?

like why is that a dealbreaker?

to deconstruct a genre, you have to get in under the hood and, you know, deconstruct it. take it apart. show how it works in ways that aren't immediately self evident. i'd say that history of violence deconstructs stories of violent heroism because it questions them, examines them, plays games with the means by which they generate their emotional effects. shawn really is just a straight-up zombie movie with jokes. it doesn't have anything to say about zombie movies, doesn't show or tell us anything about them we didn't know going in. the basic formula isn't deconstructed, it's merely referenced (constantly).

except for the scene where they sneak through town and get into the pub by pretending they are also zombies

i dunno man, i would say the central conceit - that the humans are more zombie-like than the zombies - is a pretty shrewd "take-apart"

wasn't that already done in whichever Romero movie was set in the mall?

mall of the dead

lol

I looked it up, it was Dawn

i mean, it's not as explicit as like, scream, but they are playing with pretty much every zombie movie convention, they're just not actually saying "this is the part where in the movie they'd do this"

romero's movies frequently make the point that humans are much like zombies to begin with, but i wouldn't call night of the living dead and dawn of the dead deconstructions because of this. it's a form of social criticism that seems appropriate to the setting.

im not sure we agree on what is a "deconstruction." plz to name me other examples.

i get where you're coming from s1ocki, but i'm hesitant to call a jokey half-parody a deconstruction, especially when it doesn't say anything about the basic nature and function of the genre it supposedly deconstructs. i think of SotD as a satire, and like most satire, it observes the formal conventions of a genre while also gently tweaking them. deconstruction, as i understand it, seeks to tease out the deep meanings and contradictions hidden beneath a text's surface.

now that i've said that, though, i suppose you could argue that all satire IS deconstruction, at least of a sort. why not? satire seeks to make the machinery of genre evident.

aiport was a radical deconstruction of disaster movies

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/nightofthelivingderrida.jpg

I don't think you can call anything that's meta or self-referential deconstructed, especially when it comes to comedy, which has been breaking the 4th wall since forever

i don't know that there is much real deconstruction in popular film. scream exposes the machinery of slasher films in a way that's similar to SotD (more direct, less jokey), but again, doesn't have much to say about the genre. i guess you could say that revisionist westerns often deconstruct the genre in one way or another: unforgiven, dead man, etc. also think of 70s detective dramas like the conversation and night moves, which suggest that paranoia and a delusional desire to control chaos are the engines of the genre.

stretch to call the conversation a "detective drama", but bear with me

yeah well deconstruction is a critical approach and trying to find evidence of a critical approach in a work of art is a good way to drive yrself mad

"if you want to criticize a film make a film" - jean-luc picard

what is the point of this exercise

staying fit and trim until the next episode of the walking dead airs

any film that tries to expose the internal conflicts of genre or of film itself could said to be involved in deconstruction

my favorite example is two-lane blacktop, a racing film where the participants end up drifting away, physically and psychologically

I haven't heard so much talk of deconstruction since Project Runway.

or since top chef

Zombie Voltaggios

The zombie movie version of Funny Games would have a five minute shot of zombies graphically eating someone slowly, after 45 minutes of slow shambling and long shots of flies taking off and landing on flesh.

suppose you could say that depalma deconstructs the relationship between film and its audience, in that he's constantly interrogating "looking at" and "listening to" in his films (watched dressed to kill last night). it seems more like an artistic obsession than an intellectual investigation, but i'm not sure that's a make-or-break distinction when discussing works of art.

anyway, looking forward to ep 2 of walking dead, which i probably won't see for several weeks. wonder if it will ramp up or slack off in the inventive gore department.

that's where it gets sketchy - the line between the director being a critical intellectual and supporting an aesthetic goal can get mighty thin. depalma got all his voyeurism steez from hitchcock anyway.

xp

The zombie movie version of Funny Games would have a five minute shot of zombies graphically eating someone slowly, after 45 minutes of slow shambling and long shots of flies taking off and landing on flesh. the hero had shot all the zombies in the head and the director ran the film back to let them have a second crack at it.

I thought "Buffy" was a pretty good deconstruction of vampire mythology, for example. Like, its characters are fully aware of vampire mythology, even as the vampires don't always adhere to said mythology. And when the most mythological of all vampires shows up, the other vampires make fun of him for being a showoff.

In some ways, something like "The Devil's Rejects" is a deconstruction of ... something. Especially the way it wallows in pure "horror" for so long, only to briefly flip your sympathies when the antagonists are treated to the same torture and general unpleasantness as they formerly treated the ostensible protagonists. It twists the usual us vs. them dynamics into a nihilistic ambivalence

"Beetlejuice" is, I suppose, a clever deconstruction of ghost stuff, played for laughs.

Granted, I'm going by my own internalized definition of "deconstructed," wherein the characters are aware of genre conventions (at least Buffy and Beetlejuice) and generally use them to their advantage. Devil's Rejects I guess is just more generically subversive.

I stick to my statement above - "I don't think you can call anything that's meta or self-referential deconstructed" - deconstruction involves giving a genre a real acid bath, pointing out internal conflicts, forcing it to break down, and not just "hey I'm a vampire killer who knows about vampire movies".

something like buffy is postmodern and hyperaware of its own conceits but if you use deconstruction as a description of aesthetics, I imagine it as producing something more aggressively antithetical to the viewer's needs and expectations

the fourth indiana jones was way deconstructive in that case

guess I needed to throw an "intentionally" in there

depalma got all his voyeurism steez from hitchcock anyway.

dislike this criticism of depalma (no offense). he owes a lot to hitchcock, sure, but in films like blow out, dressed to kill, body double and femme fatale, he takes that voyeurism steez and runs so far over the horizon with it that it becomes something distinctly his.

I AM OFFENDED

tbh I like depalma more than I like hitch

agree with edward III here. films like buffy, beetlejuice and the devil's rejects don't deconstruct their genres. they're merely explicitly aware of them and/or subversive about them. i mean, what does buffy have to say about vampire mythology (other than that it's silly and fun)? what does it attempt to show us about the guts of the genre that we didn't know going in? nothing. therefore it isn't really a deconstruction.

me too (xpost)

oh hey super-primitive deconstruction: man with a movie camera

so I reread the beginning of the thread and these 3 ominous premonitions sum up everything I didn't like about the show

The admittedly small number of issues I read didn't seem to either add anything significant to zombie mythology or have particularly interesting characters.

― A brownish area with points (chap), Thursday, October 14, 2010 7:02 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

zombie apocalypse is a great canvas for right wing/nra/libertarian types to express their i-told-you-so-liberal-faggits wish fullment on and i thought the books veered close to this territory too often for my reading comfort.

― MAX NOT FOR MOD (Roberto Spiralli), Thursday, October 14, 2010 8:43 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Why do people hate the comic but expect this to be good? Should I not even ask?

because i'm pretty sure kirkman has no idea how human relationships work, and everything reads like teenage melodrama. any writer would be an improvement.

― the parking garage has more facebook followers than my band (Jordan), Thursday, October 14, 2010 10:46 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

Man you guys have been *busy*!

many xxposts (since deconstruction is well covered lol) for contenderizer: re the question of wtf run down old hospital exterior with modern interior...this is a pretty common US phenomenon. Heck, it's a common Australian phenomenon too. Retrofitting is pretty commonplace, especially in older cities or places with old buildings. Sacramento for one. Was it more the type of building vs the interior that you're driving at?

Also I had hoped for a zombie horse myself when the zombies started feasting on deputy dawg's horsey, but alas, I guess the world isn't ready for that.

Was it more the type of building vs the interior that you're driving at?

yeah, this. inside, it looked like a proper modern hospital. outside, it looked like some collapsing warehouse that they'd (lightly) dressed as a hospital so save money. discontinuity was striking. more bored nitpicking than a real complaint though.

question:

why did the zombies not eat him when he was lying prone in the hospital

i was bothered by the hospital exterior too, like "damn, i guess that hospital was abandoned years before the whole zombie thing"

xpost Because the hospital zombies were all locked in the DO NOT DEAD INSIDE room.

That is a very interesting name for a room

he was in a coma and wasn't making any sound

xxxp

and the zombies failed in their attempts to organize a room-by-room search

oh yeah, DON'T DEAD ENTER INSIDE

Just out of curiousity, what "significant additions to zombie mythology" would ppl like to see added? That they're all secretly good at volleyball? That you can't feed them after midnight? That zombies on Bizarro Planet walk quickly and spit up body parts?

yes that's exactly what we were thinking

I'd like to see zombies done more like vampires; lucid predators who can plan and trap running prey etc

That they can dance in formation imo

also I want to read zombie poetry, as I'm sure it would be very touching

SPOILER (skip me)

.

.

.

thought the bit abt the guy trying to get up the nerve to shoot his zombie wife was very well done

I'm not being flippant -- it's a serious question! (xpost thank u Dan)

Not to go all meta-Capt. Rhodes/Day Of The Dead here, but they're fuckin' dead! Your options for "mythology" are pretty limited, to "How does one become a zombie?", "Can it be cured?", "How quickly do they move?", "Can they think?" and "How do you kill them?"

Well, like I noted above, "World War Z" and I suppose "Land of the Dead" are the only two zombies stories I can think of that take place well after an outbreak. It'd be interesting to see a zombie movie about rebuilding/starting over. But I guess the dramatic narative might be too difficult to suss out.

i dont want any fuckin clever twilight-style twists on what a zombie is tbh

"clever"

ya ha

"clever" = "mormon"

How about zombies that start out slow, shambling monsters that eat flesh, but if they go too long without eating any their zombie metabolisms rev up, making them move faster and jerkier until they explode, infecting any living animal their effluvia touches? If they catch and eat something, it sates their systems and they cycle back down into slow shamblers.

dunno about significant additions, but i would really like to see someone make a smart, gory zombie-plague movie that doesn't just use "it's a zombie movie ffs!" as a justification for whatever ridiculous shit the genre seems to demand. don't know that i've seen one yet. 28 days later came closest, but seemed to want to operate outside the genre in a way that bothered me.

suppose you could expand the mythology at this point by dropping all the bullshit pseudo-medical justification and going back to the supernatural.

Zombies are reanimated spirits trapped in their decaying bodies who cannot be freed until they devour their loved ones.

I posted a list of recent films that have done something interesting with or expanded on the zombie apocalypse shtick, there's a lot of room to do interesting stuff if you don't slavishly limit yourself to the ground everyone else has thoroughly shambled over

les revanants - what if everybody who was dead came back to life, and they didn't want to eat us?

pontypool - language is a virus from outer space

deadgirl - two teenage boys find female zombie chained in basement of abandoned building, bad decisions ensue

the signal - a variation on the crazies-type apocalypse movie, but is way funnier and scarier than your average zombie flick because you don't know what to expect next

the end of the line - ditto

hi dere's 1st idea is good. or start fast when fresh, devolve into slow shamblers over time or without blood. really nail down the mechanisms of infection (if you wanna keep on with the bullshit pseudo-medical angle).

edit: god, and that second suggestion! someone should make that fucking movie.

most of these films I listed are not as "accomplished" as the walking dead, but they are also not as bland

There was an online comic strip that did a weird twist on zombies where they were technically still alive but not able to regenerate their bodily systems (pulmonary, cardiovascular, muscular, etc) without consuming working live tissue; the smart ones had to eat a lot of brains to remain smart.

you are very adept at producing scenarios for movies that you'd never ever watch

pontypool is great! really nice twist on the mythology. was impressed but repulsed by deadgirl. accomplished, but i didn't enjoy it much.

you are very adept at producing scenarios for movies that you'd never ever watch

I'd read the novelization, though.

(also I'm much more likely to watch a zombie flick than a slasher flick)

i used to think living in a zombie run world would be kinda cool, until i had a nightmare about it and realised it would be the most awful terrifying shit ever.

I was serious about zombies dancing in formation fwiw

i dont want any fuckin clever twilight-style twists on what a zombie is tbh

I am amused by the idea of a zombie version of Twilight! I should write it up so I can start making piles of money like Stephenie Meyer.

they're not actually gory they're just sparkly

i liked this show but it's definitely just going by the numbers at this point and it seems that they're just content to have a zombie television series. i'm looking forward to potential expansion beyond the influences of the show and i hope it doesn't doesn't descend into utterly lame plot devices.

I was serious about zombies dancing in formation fwiw

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/Jackson_popcorn.gif

"at this point" = 1 episode!

I am amused by the idea of a zombie version of Twilight!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/38/Boyfriend

"at this point" = 1 episode!

it was a looooooooooong episode

well i mean at this point i don't see any real signs of trying to attempt anything really different, but at the same time i'm not really complaining.

have come to the depressing conclusion that most horror fans don't want anything really different

this kinda reminds me of shakey mo on the literary fiction thread - something can be interesting and different without having some crazy, genre-exploding formal element. not that 'the walking dead' is an example of this.

something can be interesting and different without having some crazy, genre-exploding formal element.

I'm not all "every zombie movie must be CRAZY and FREE", just think the walking dead fails on both of yr points

xpost Because the hospital zombies were all locked in the DO NOT DEAD INSIDE room.

― That is the stench of tyranny (VegemiteGrrrl)

That is a very interesting name for a room

― lol tea partiers and their fat fingers (HI DERE)

You don't have a DO NOT DEAD INSIDE room? Where on earth do you entertain visiting friends? Honestly!

man, you miss one fucking word...

DO NOT FUCKING DEAD INSIDE

every implication I can think of for inflection of this sentence is terrifying

http://www.jimbeeer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/fido-dvd-art.jpg

Is this a deconstruction?

haha sorry I wasn't mocking the missing a word, I just wanted to make that joke...

DO NOT FUCKING DEAD INSIDE BERSERKER!

http://content7.flixster.com/question/53/96/65/5396657_std.jpg

i thought you were making fun of the fact that if you read the words in rows instead of columns, it said something like DON'T DEAD ENTER INSIDE

xp

if this show was more awesome it would have paused while the hero tried to parse that phrase until finally getting it

"don't be dead, enter inside?"

I don't die if I go in here

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/walking9.jpg

I did read it across at first and was all, huh?
DON'T DEAD OPEN INSIDE

CAFETERIA for extra lulz

I thought the zombies had written the sign as a lure, like those coyote-written signs to lure the road runner
FREE FUD HEER

lol

ya hah

haven't watched this series but I think the comic is just a rehashed zombie story. it brings nothing new to the table.

after reading enough about this series, the "new thing" seems to be a zombie story that continues. Kirkman said his reason for starting this was his disappointment in not being able to see what happens next. i'm totally fine with this approach, actually this is kind of what i want. a very classic zombie story that just keeps unrolling beyond what we typically see.

the pilot wasn't at all boring to me. this is actually very much what i wanted. a zombie story with a lot of quiet and discovery.

a very classic zombie story that just keeps unrolling beyond what we typically see.

otm!

I'm glad these are some OG Ramero-style zombies who just sort of amble haphazardly w/o being able to run. Zombies already have strength in numbers - giving them hyperkinetic musculature on top of that was just sorta unfair imo.

*Romero

Rambero

otm

I loved this show. I am not much of a zombie fan but this was pretty ace.

I really dug it too but I was amazed by a. how quickly our hero adapted to waking up in a brave new zombie world, and also b. his complete lack of curiosity as to how the fuck this happened. I'm having Lost deja vu where you're wondering why nobody asks each other basic questions about the situation. I would be badgering anyone within reach to tell me how long I was out, how extensive it is (Alabama? North America? northern hemisphere?) But they've got to pad this out, so I accept that.

Intrigued by the piles and piles of pristine military hardware lying about - somebody somewhere (hoping for a zombie Dennis Hopper with an eyepatch) is amassing a serious army if all this is just around for the taking. I'm sure they'll get to that at some point (zombie virus moved quickly through close-knit groups or some such).

Sorry if this has already been addressed - somebody was telling me this is a six-episode season. That right?

that is correct.

Thinking about this a day later, it does seem good-but-not-great. But my objections to the acting were silly, I think. If you're going to make an upmarket show in a b-grade genre, unknown actors that are a bit clunky are part of the spirit of the endeavor. I'm impressed by how much genuine love went into this show.

how can you tell how much genuine love went into this show

cannn you feeeeeel .... the gooooore .... toniiiiiiiiiiiiite

Thanks for six-ep clarification. I was wondering if popping zombies in the head and people crying as they cap a spouse would get pretty old by episode 11.

Saw Monsters the other night and now I'm mixing up which post-apocalyptic bleak deserted landscape belongs to which show.

yeah the hero did seem to get over the whole "the world is destroyed, the dead are eating the living" shit pretty quickly.

how can you tell how much genuine love went into this show

If you have to ask...

exploding zombie heads and long closeups of crawling zombies and buzzing flies over blackened corpse feet = LURVE imo

wow kinda suprised to see so many people down on this show - i watch lots of crazo horror stuff and yeah most of it might be a little more edgy and OTT and better in many ways than this, but im still down with the "HOLY SHIT A GORY ZOMBIE MINISERIES ON THE TV AWESOME" reaction tbh.

esp considering that like 99% of TV horror attempts have been unmitigatedly fucking awful

^

no idea what the comix are like, but i am hoping this goes in the direction of... deadwood!

hours and hours of survival horror is not interesting, and lost-style soapy shit among the survivors isn't either. but people figuring out how to live with each other and build ad-hoc institutions of stability in extreme circumstances is super interesting imo

any chance of that?

thats my hope, but i havent read the comics either.

part of my optimism tho is that a miniseries or series or whatever handled right could totally fulfill that long arc post societal breakdown/rebuilding in a way that zombie movies never ever can - all respect to the dawn/day of the dead stuff or 28 days/weeks, but commenting on it isnt the same as showing it happen.

I read a little bit of a current issue of the comic and it involved a lot of people on a farm standing around and yelling at each other

about leaving the toilet seat up or down, I'm sure.

also peeps saying the gore/FX aren't up to par may i please direct you to another comparable low tier cable network called SYFY which should maybe change yer feelings about that.

i think the gore is good

i dont think the fact that it is a zombie show alone is reason enough to give it a pass... i mean, i like zombie movies but it's not like they're exactly underrepresented in pop culture

dreading the inevitable mummy movie renaissance

Brendan Frazier did well enough with that already, imo.

Sorry, Fraser.

no one ever has to apologize to brendan fraser

Dug the pilot. The creators obviously saw 28 Days Later and played Left 4 Dead, but I was surprised how well the pacing and effects came out. I don't know why but I had an optimism about this too, it seems like a good medium for the ongoing story.

I read some of the comic too, but gave up after a few volumes, it just got too relentlessly depressing - seemed like they were just going to go from one shitty situation to another every volume. Also as said, the art wasn't very good. I never even got to the samurai character.

hours and hours of survival horror is not interesting, and lost-style soapy shit among the survivors isn't either. but people figuring out how to live with each other and build ad-hoc institutions of stability in extreme circumstances is super interesting imo

any chance of that?

The creators obviously saw 28 Days Later - Even tho the initial premise is basically the same (man wakes up in hospital to find himself seemingly alone in post-apocalyptic wasteland), but the graphic novel this show is based on was published in 2003, the same year 28DL was released, so the similarity is likely a coincidence.

If not a trope in itself.

there is a quote in the middle of this thread where the creator talks about how 28DL came out the month before the first issue of this was published

And isn't it just an example of a literary device which thrusts the reader/viewer directly into the post zombie apocalypse world, and provides at least one story arc for later on; namely, HOW THE FUCK DID THIS HAPPEN?

I'm trying to think of another setting in which this could apply - waking up after the mid-term election results come in? Blacking out at a party, and waking up with no clothes on?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res

such premises are easy (& often effective) devices, tropes etc., sure. And even tho zombie stories in general rely on so many other shared narrative similarities, it was still sort of uncanny that two 'zombie' stories, released within a month of each other, started with an an extended opening sequence w/ protagonists in nearly identical sets of circumstances.

I'm aware it's not a fully unique idea, but they are really similar and they came out around the same time. Sure, it's possible when Kirkman wrote it he just had the same idea, it happens. According to WP, the first issue of The Walking Dead is dated October 2003, while 28 Days Later came out late 2002 in the UK and June '03 in the US. Regardless, I can't help but think the success of the movie impacted the current TV series. Even L4D, another property that uses a lot of old zombie tropes, seemed to influence this, with the general look, graffiti on the walls, lol no gas etc. (If the chopper pilot turns out to be a zombie...)

Regarding the "28 Days Later" opening, Kirkman:

"I saw 28 Days Later shortly before the first issue of Walking Dead was released. That first issue came out in October of 2003 and 28 Days Later was released in the States in June of 2003. So we were working on our second issue by the time I saw it. Yeah. It was a little annoying. But great minds think alike, right"

― circa1916, Monday, November 1, 2010 3:17 PM

since ppl can't be bothered to read the middle of the thread

yeah, but apparently they came out around the same time...

the dawn of the dead remake was on tv before this, and the end is both soooo corny (lol slow-motion shot of the clip falling out of a handgun) and so influential on L4D (that last shot of the four survivors getting on the board after escaping hoards of running zombies). still has a great opening though.

it really is underrated. pales in comparison to the original, obv, but works pretty well as an action romp on its own. and yeah, that opening is A+

important to say it's an action picture though. fast moving zombies take away the horror imo*. it's most effective moments of dread involved large groups of zombies shuffling around.

*exception for me is the shot in Dead Set where the zombie sprints onto screen and goes to town on that Big Brother Employee on the console while that Mika song plays.

the last last shot in the remake is cool

you mean the part after the credits?

ya

I don't think it's so much that it's "zombies on TV" that's cool, more that it's a serious attempt at serialized, straight-up horror on a network known for quality television - I'm not sure there's any precedent for that?

im not sure why that's a big deal?

...because new forms of TV don't spring up very often? I mean I guess there's (the similarly high-rated) True Blood but that appears to pretty much entirely camp.

btw if you think The Walking Dead is lackluster, wait till horror TV gets the Fox/NBC/ABC treatment.

there was that cbs show starring alex o'loughlin as a vampire...who is also a private detective!

well there have been a couple of horror/procedural "hybrids" I guess, but that's not really the same thing.

there was that cbs show starring alex o'loughlin as a vampire...who is also a private detective!

That show was straight up hilarious though, albeit unintentionally.

what about that supernatural show? watched it a couple times and it seemed like hot crap, but it's pretty much straight-up horror television.

supernatural's more like a broody dude version of Buffy.

what about buffy/angel?

OR THE GHOST WHISPERER YALL

Supernatural's horror, but it's tempered with melodrama and comedy. Same with Buffy. There's a place for that, but I think of it differently to what Walking Dead represents.

Walking Dead excites me because it's straight drama/horror, like what you would see in a movie. That's what my excitement is all about. Zombies! On TV! That aren't making witty comebacks, they're just being zombies. (Not that I don't love Buffy, or Angel, or a little bit of Supernatural every now and again).

next week 'the walking dead' introduces a witty british zombie named 'percy'

last network straight horror i remember was that "fear itself" thing which was one of the shittiest things foisted on the public in recent memory

how quickly we forget "Happy Town"

oh hahahaha wow yeah that happened didnt it

also: "Harper's Island"

actually werent harpers island and fear itself concurrent?

Yeah, I think they were.

I only saw the commercials so as far as I'm concerned, IT NEVER HAPPENED

read the Wikipedia article for "Harper's Island", it is lolworthy

oh hahaha and thank go "fear itself" did choose to tackle the Wendigo, which i am sure was done with great skill and aplomb. and with further imdb research it was directed by the last winter dude, so he seems to be a little wendigo obsessed. to prove this, he also did the 2001 film "Wendigo".

masters of horror was some bullshit too imo

for the most part

Masters of Bore-or, am i rite?

actually looking through the fear itself director list is like a whos who of directors no one should hire, its kind of amazing

xpost yeah i hated like 90% of the masters of horror stuff, was only really down w/fair-haired child

i sort of enjoyed the flagrantly cruddy badness of masters of horror. like tales from the crypt episodes. shame how little the sensibilities of the various directors come through though (miike aside, yikes).

I tried watching Haven for a while but that was kind of a snooze. And not really very horror. More boring supernatural.

The first ep of Masters of Horror, the Coscarelli joint was pretty cool I remember. I heard some okay things about Carpenter's two, "Cigarette Burns" and "Pro Life" but I honestly couldn't get my head around watching it because modern day Carpenter is just never a good thing. I love him, but I hate him, ya know? And he and women, especially now that he's old and crabby...yeesh.

Oh and the Joe Dante political satire was basically a giant facepalm.

The zombies make excellent noises in this. I found it all incredibly gripping, even though I didn't like the comic much.

What's the consensus in this shockingly long thread? Tried to skim it and got bogged down in a sexism argument.

yay @ zombies! vs
eyeroll @ "zombies"

is pretty much how it boils down

Well at the beginning of the pilot my default position was the latter, but by the end it was the former. Well done The Walking Dead.

That's what I'm sayin!

There was more pathos for the zombies than in your average thing, that could be an interesting tack to take.

nothing new here I thought. The leads seem as lifeless and wooden as the zombies themselves. will be skipping...

I'll mark you down for eyeroll @ "zombies"

Finally saw this. Wasn't bad. I was, however, struck by the graphic violence vs. the relatively chaste language. Guess AMC has different inscrutable standards than FX. And yeah, lots of weird woman hating in this ep, though there are plenty of strong women to come.

MASSIVE xxxxxposts and this is a major

MAJOR POTENTIAL SPOILER avert your eyes if needed but:

if when zombies sense people their impulse is to head over and eat them and tear them apart until there's nothing left, where do new zombies come from?
― candid gamera (s1ocki), Tuesday, November 2, 2010 12:39 PM (2 days ago)

well, this doesn't address your "tear them apart until there's nothing left" but in the comic, one of the major zombie rules that has NOT yet shown up in the show but almost certainly WILL (because some big plot points circle around it) is that if ANYBODY in this new world dies (whether it's from a zombie bite or not), they eventually come back to life as a zombie.

Which is part of what makes the title cutesy: the walking dead doesn't really refer so much to the zombies as it does to those who will ultimately BE zombies in the not-too-distant future, which is to say our protagonists do u c

That's pretty cool!

one of the major zombie rules that has NOT yet shown up in the show but almost certainly WILL (because some big plot points circle around it) is that if ANYBODY in this new world dies (whether it's from a zombie bite or not), they eventually come back to life as a zombie.

good call, imo, cuz even in romero-verse, the initial zombie plague consists of dead risen from graveyards and the like. not bite victims, but just any old sort of dead people that happen to have been exposed to moon mist. i mean, if it were bite transmitted only, it'd be fairly easy to control, at least outside the initial outbreak area.

it also makes the story much more open ended, because the potential is there (and some of the comics storylines outline and point to) a world in which people get it together enough to form communities and procreate and have multiple post-zombie generations and it just becomes part of life that there are always going to be these predators as part of the new landscape.

In other words, there's not a world war z style reclamation so much as we learn to live an uneasy existence with our own dead

^ downside of this is that zombies become boring, like the flu. o shit there is zombies in the alley. get the kids inside and call the squad.

yah, but the upside is that before long zombies are like narcotrafickers in Breaking Bad (or alcohol in Mad Men? I dunno, there are no good metaphors here) and we just get into the human relationships and people fucking each other up. That's why complaints about acting/writing are relevant because by the time this gets to season three, zombies are gonna be much less of a major immediate problem and more like a constant natural disaster that letting your guard down around will get you killed over

human drama on TV is never an upside

i mean, i mostly just want to see spock be quizzical in technicolor

or zombies eating people

i get that too. but even two years of "AH ZOMBIE AH NOM NOM NOM" is gonna get tired. They gotta produce some human interest that's soapy enough. Man that kid had better be able to act.

yeah, no, agreed. was kidding mostly. have a certain resistance to EVERYTHING being all soapy and long-form dramatic on TV these days, but overall quality of writing is way better than it's ever been, so can't complain too much. in that regard, this show needs to get its game up, maybe just a little. nobody's bad, but our leads and general tone of dialogue leave me cold. hoping for wife/gf & kid itr.

i'm totally cool with giving this a season before i levy judgment one way or another in terms of acting and plot. AH ZOMBIE AH NOM NOM NOM is gonna be fine for at least eight hours.

have a certain resistance to EVERYTHING being all soapy and long-form dramatic on TV these days

I don't know how much TV you watch, but let me assure you that this is not a catching disease.

The networks and cable channels that do take the risk (and it's still a pretty significant risk) to put on a show that takes time to build and develop an audience and hopefully later sell on DVD -- well, I have nothing bad to say about them. They're walking a tightrope, because the shows have to build episode by episode enough that you can't start watching in the middle, but the shows can't be so slow that they allow for dead spots.

his complete lack of curiosity as to how the fuck this happened.

Instead of trying to survive, he will try to find someone and just ask how this happened. Fuck survival. ;-)

xp, and sorry for the rant, but...

Also, what old-style TV network has even tried to do this? And don't say "Lost" -- you could give that show as much attention as you could afford without giving up sleeping, and it still wouldn't make any goddamn sense. That's not long-form drama, it's just increasingly complicated and interestingly shaped piles of turds. And don't say soap opera either, because that's not really long-form, it's endless-form, which is different, and requires a different kind of writing. The long-form TV drama as it is currently being made isn't just TV that leaves you hanging every week, it's a very new kind of storytelling on TV, made possible by a new kind of TV market. HBO pioneered it, and AMC really hung their stuff out over the ledge when they decided to try the same thing. More than HBO did, even, because they're not even PAY cable, they're just cable. (Though I think there's less and less difference.)

At any rate, soapy happens and always will, but the really good stuff on TV is better than any good stuff has ever been. It's a goddamn golden age. Enjoy it while it lasts, I say.

I very much agree with the golden age thing, Kenan. We're bombarded with fantastic telly.

yeh, no complaints in that dep't. most all my favorite television shows are products of the last 10 years. this isn't to say that i don't get tired of certain formulae.

xp - Co-sign you both. You make an excellent point there, Kenan.

A few of my acquaintances still trot out the tired old "I don't watch TV" line in a sniffy manner, which to my mind just betrays ignorance of how much great stuff there has been in the last decade or so.

On topic, I really dug TWD, particularly the unstinting nastiness of the gore which was surprisingly close to the knuckle for a TV show. I know nothing about the source material, so have no idea where it's going long-term, but will def. be watching to find out.

I HATE people who look down on telly. (Well, not really.)

I think I'll read the books now. My husband has been raving about the comics for the longest time.

Romero already did the practical living with the dead thing in "Land of the Dead." And wrt the bite thing, it's always been zombie lore that the "dead or recently dead" come back to life. The bite just hastens death. You get bit, the virus kills you, you come back as a zombie.

I thought this was pretty good. I'll keep watching.

i agree we're in a tv golden age

doesn't make this show any better

xp yeah, but in Walking Dead world (the comic at least) you don't need to get bit. If you die, you turn. It's something in the earth or whatever. That means when granpa dies a natural death, you don't bury him; you shoot him in the head.

you say potato

i say aaaaaaagggggggggghhh brains aaaaaaaaagh

-o

lol forks

And wrt the bite thing, it's always been zombie lore that the "dead or recently dead" come back to life. The bite just hastens death. You get bit, the virus kills you, you come back as a zombie.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, November 4, 2010 6:39 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah, i spoke too hastily. those are the basic "rules." but many contemporary zombie flicks suggest that only the bitten go shambly. varies film to film though.

"only the bitten go shambly"...if this thing goes into season 2, that's our thread title right there

cosine

Thrice.

this is pretty good. oddly my friend just published a zombie novel a few months ago (the reapers are the angels, which is really an incredible little novel, very much a southern gothic, owes a lot to Winter's Bone and McCarthy) so it feels like zombies are now really part of the zeitgeist, taking over from those fancy vampires.

jeez yeah. they're fucking everywhere the last few years. go into any bookshop and there's likely to be a display table dedicated solely to zombie titles. zombie jane austen, zombie survival guides, zombie novels and comics, toys & DVDs, etc. almost more so than vampires, who seem confined to teen & goth (and teengoth) novel series.

my son got me a zombie board game for my birthday

he's fascinated with zombies even though he can't watch any zombie movies (he's 9)

that's not true, he loves white zombie. gonna let him watch night of the comet, too.

Remember zombie banks?

oddly my friend just published a zombie novel a few months ago (the reapers are the angels,

a friend of mine is finishing up a literary zombie novel too. i don't think i'm going to tell him about this, since there are some superficial similarities (the ages of the protagonists, for one). :/

Just read a zombie novel, too: 'Rise Again' by Ben Tripp -- not bad. Doesn't do much that's new, but entertaining and engaging and grim enough. And the protag is a female soldier with PTS, and the two main supporting characters are gay (one male, one female), which was unusual.

I HATE people who look down on telly. (Well, not really.)

I think the problem is that all media have their shitty ends of the spectrum, but TV's is much bigger and much worse, just because you have so much time and so many channels to fill. Plenty of shit movies/albums/books, but for the most part those industries don't have quotas to fill.

I agree that TV is totally primo right now. I work for a dvd distributor and I can get my hands on a lot of movie screeners but honestly, I spend so much time watching tv shows that I don't watch a ton of movies any more, not like I used to. And it's not because the movies aren't good. It's just I can't *not* watch my tv shows. There's a few junky shows in there, but for the most part, it's all gold!

that totally came out a lot more dickish than I meant it to

I swear I'm not a dick

I want to bump the person that said something along the lines of "I'm not looking forward to the ILX discussion" but I can't find that post anymore

how about not read the ILX discussion then

you first

re the previous discussion, TV is totally my most-consumed artform at the moment apart from music.