I wanted to like this series, good golly fuck did I want to like it. On paper it's basically a checklist of 'SHIT GRUMPY RECKONS WOULD MAKE A KICKASS TV SERIES'. Awesome comic source material, check. Zombies, check. Story focusing on descent of a principle character's morality and sanity in a world that's going progressively more and more to shit, check. More zombies, check.
This is why I'm really disappointed that I don't think it's a good show.
The writers don't seem to understand the concept of pacing, of momentum. Everything is so drawn out and stretched to the point that entire episodes can pass by with literally fuck all happening, with only some cheeky little hook added in at the end to keep stringing the viewer along. Season Two was bad enough, with thirteen episodes of the cast mostly sitting around at a farm twiddling their thumbs, but Season Three is sixteen episodes and the writers seem to have no idea how to make the story last across this vast running time.
It didn't need to be sixteen cunting episodes. The story could have been told in ten, easily, and it would have felt far less protracted.
The characters themselves are another thing the writers seem to struggle with, given that the tone of some of them is all over the fucking joint. Is Rick a borderline nutcase who's barely holding it together because of the shit he's experienced since the outbreak, or is a hard-as-nails and highly competent leader of the apocalypse? I'm all for characters shifting tone, but those two don't exactly go hand in hand. Why do you even bother giving certain characters a backstory when you're going to kill them off the same episode? Seriously, that happened several times throughout the course of Season Three. "Oh look, this minor character just had some light shed on their life before the outbreak. Guess this'll be their last episode, then."
So yeah, that's The Walking Dead for me. I wish I could get behind it, but there's a few too many glaring fucking flaws with the whole thing.
