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Brain Food
When there’s no more room in remake hell, The Walking Dead will rule TV / by Sean L. Maloney
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raaaaaaains! And in a television writer’s room no less! While AMC has cer-
tainly had success with boundary-pushing shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men and the criminally underrated spy drama Rubicon, one hardly could have considered that The Walking Dead—a show about a scrappy group of survivors in a zombie-infested, post-apocalyptic world—to be their biggest win yet. Sure, the undead have seen a resurgence over the last decade—frequently in a bastardized high-speed version of the traditional ghoul-type, still more tolerable than the whole sparkly vampire thing—but rarely do they crawl out of their shallow critical grave to feast on the noggins of so many viewers. Most of the show’s success is rooted in its format (one story arc over six episodes, which allows for more depth than the nonstop shocks we expect from our 90-minute zombie narratives), the source material (Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charles Adlard’s Eisner-award winning comics of the same name) and the guidance of the show’s creator, threetime Oscar nominee Frank Darabont. Darabont— whose credits include directing the film versions of The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and writing, um, Nightmare on Elm Street 3:Dream Warriors—has an uncanny knack for drawing out the humanity from underneath the horror and hocus pocus of his subject matter. We’re talking about a knack that is only rivaled by masters like George Romero in his original Deadtrilogy days (let’s just pretend that Diary of the Dead never happened) and David Cronenberg at his headexploding, Videodrome-ing best. Decapitations and 48
The Walking Dead: Season One arrives March 8 from Anchor Bay Entertainment.
splattered innards are still de rigueur—this is a horror series after all—but they function as a way of moving, rather than subsuming, action. Every bullet to the brain of an undead ghoul is a jumping-off point for deeper character development, an exploration of broader emotions than just pure, primal fear. Yes, the show is called The Walking Dead, but its true focus—the real star of the series—is the varied, emotional responses of its human characters. While Darabont’s guidance can’t be undersold, the series would have been nothing without such a stellar cast. Their acting elevates the characters beyond the cardboard cutouts and genre tropes fans have come to expect—plain and simple. Lead actor Andrew Lincoln, as Deputy Rick Grimes, who spent the zombie outbreak in a coma only to awaken to a world he doesn’t recognize, gives a complicated and endearing performance as a hero driven as much by duty as confusion and fear. Sarah Wayne Callies, who plays Lincoln’s wife Lori, toes a line between maternal and mortal that makes every Lifetime mom-inperil made-for-TV movie look like a Benny Hill sketch. Augmented by veteran character actors like Laurie Holden, Jeffery DeMunn and Michael Rooker, and working with such outstanding material, The Walking Dead delivers the best shows on television. And plenty of brains. It’s still about zombies after all.