danse macabre
Date: Feb 13th, 2012 1:20:43 pm - Subscribe
Mood: intrigued
The Walking Dead TV show got going again last night, literally picking up right where the last episode ended. Before that they ran a marathon of the first season, which I watched with the sound down while listening to the Messer Chups on my mp3 player. It was spooky how often it synched up.
The bad pun, aftershow rundown, The Talking Dead,was pretty interesting as well. Last night it was rocker Dave Navarro giving a piece of his mind to one of the show's producers. He was speaking for a lot of the show's fans in expressing his frustration that there haven't been enough zombie kills lately. It really underscored what I see as the trap the show puts its creators in.
TWD is a variation on the post-holocaust genre, substituting ravenous ghouls for the more typical nuclear war or virulent plague. All the tropes of the genre are in play. The breakdown of civilization, people driven to extremes, protagonists taking morally questionable measures to survive, etc. The focus is usually on the toll all of this takes on the characters' humanity. But whereas most entries into the genre feature a naturalist disaster -- an atomic blast, a pandemic, a meteor strike, etc. -- TWD adopts the fantastic premise of rapacious undead hordes. And that creates a catch 22.
The catch is that zombie shows primarily appeal to gorehounds who tune in to see people getting dismembered and the undead getting their heads blown off. Unless each episode is a blood drenched shoot-em-up they're going to loose interest and the show's going to tank. So the very premise of the show which leads to its popularity -- the "zombie apocalypse" -- paradoxically hinders it from becoming something more than a shallow splatfest.
Fans like Dave Navarro could care less about characterization and moral dilemmas. They want dead butch types like Shane blowing away zombies -- and anyone else that gets in the way.
Exactly how the show's creators resolve this tension will determine whether it lives up to its potential to be a substantive drama or degenerates into a sadomasochistic gorefest.
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