I'm watching the Walking Dead into its second season, and I'm astonished by how much worse it seems. The first season laid out a pretty grand promise of potential, using the exceptional amount of scope provided by six hours of drama to tell a wide arc of stories in a singular apocalyptic setting.
There's a lot of appeal to that universe, as the current zombie craze helps demonstrate. It's not hard to guess why: a sparse, desolate setting that makes great cinema, the gore and gloop of the rotting fleshoids, an appealing fantasy of "the last man on earth" or "a ragtag group of survivors" matched by constant conflict and a struggle for survival. And there's room for some really deep stuff too, the dark mirrors created by these walking shades mimicking their former lives, the behavior of humans when human society breaks down, and the study of meaning in a world where any belief in the greater purpose of humanity or god is broken beyond repair.
So this is great story territory, and it's incredibly well suited to a serial drama. The reason for this is that this genre allows moments of inspired observation and cinema that you cannot make otherwise, and each of these moments has to be created by a separate chain of events. A lot of good zombie movies follow this line of thought already. Rather than a connected plot of one greater meaning, there's an intro to the apocalypse which is typically stunning, a travelogue of random happenstances where shit alternately happens and doesn't happen, and a big final conflict leading to what can be a happy ending but is usually a giant fuck you, because the ending doesn't really matter.
What matters are those moments along the way - the point in 28 Days where the protagonist lets out his animal and the zombies cease to recognize him. The bit in Dawn of the Dead where, having achieved total safety, the survivors become a miserable hollow shell of a family unit. Francine whispering "what have we done to ourselves?". Will Smith in I Am Legend going crazy in solitude and triggering one of his own traps - either set by a zombie, or by himself. Britain, empty. New York, empty. Silence, terrible silence.
The zombie genre is, as Hideo Kojima might describe it, a vehicle for great art, though not always an art in itself. It's a setting with a lot of great things that people can relate to, an easy place to explore with a pen and paper and video camera and copious amount of fake blood. It's an opportunity to tell great stories, and a call to arms.
From the opening credits you can tell that The Walking Dead answered this call. Sometimes it's just the simple pieces of beautiful concept art, like, say, the moment where our lead character Rick gets caught on top of a tank, or that great shot of the freeway with all of the broken-down cars leading in one direction. Other times they're arcs - the journey to the city, Merle Dixon and the handcuffs, the corny CDC plot which was, at least, unique ground to cover. But yeah. It's there, whatever "it" is.
And Season Two has it too. This episode a bunch of zombies went to a church and sat down quietly in the pews, just as they had in their former lives, and stayed there until a batch of survivors beat them to death with hatchets in front of a Catholic crucifix. A better one: a group of survivors stumbled upon a suicide victim with a pin on his shirt emblazoned NO EXCUSE FOR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.
So I am pleased to report that the Walking Dead is still trying to say something, albeit that it is right now trying to say something about religion, very clumsily. And while the popular cry seems to be MOAR ZOMBIES, that's not the problem I'm having right now.
It's the characters.
Look - all of the things I mentioned above are pretty damn important, and really the reason to watch the show. But you can't have a story without interesting, relatable, unique and dynamic characters, especially if it is a serial drama. And when the Walking Dead opens its second season on a haphazard narrative in a hatefully bad accent by a man who is talking like he swallowed a speechwriting book and choked on it, a man who for no goddamn reason is still wearing that ridiculous Sheriff's hat...
The main character of The Walking Dead is Rick. As you can see from his outfit, he's a caricature, a righteous southern sheriff who only tries to do what is right. He never deviates from this path. And because of this, he's eminently forgettable. I remember his name only because it sounds funny if you say it in a terrible southern accent.
In fact, I couldn't actually name a single other person on the cast. I could tell you the guy in the Hawaiian floral shirt is probably the most interesting, right alongside the second Dixon brother, and that this character or that is "the mother" or "the sister" or "the rapey deputy". There are at least two party members who have no skills or talents and who have received no major dialogue or plot arcs since their introduction. They're also the racial minorities in the survivors party.
Not one of these people has either the presence of mind or the strength of character to really surpass the sequences of events that dictate their lives. They're slow and aimless and unlikeable. And now that the honeymoon phase is over and the initial burst of gravitas the show rode in on is done, we're spending all of our time getting to know them, just like we should.
And it's terrible.
If the Walking Dead is going to continue in this vein, the ability of any sane human being to care for these people is going to evaporate. They're currently struggling for the right to exist, but their existence is by and large meaningless if none of them have motivations or desires beyond survival. If the show wants to reach its potential and show that it can really be good, it needs new cast members, or some serious work on the old ones.
At the start of the second episode, Rick is suddenly forced to run several miles carrying a heavy load in a fit of absolute, complete, utter desperation. He is still wearing his giant, oversized, gaudy hat. It looks ridiculous. It creates tremendous wind resistance and heats up his head. He should knock it off and leave it in the field - but then it would be gone, and you'd never see it again. And despite the immense, terrible gravity of the situation, I can't help shake the ridiculous feeling that if a passing gust were to snag the thing off his head, he'd drop what he was carrying, turn around and come back for it. Because, really: there isn't much of a person beneath that hat.
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