These two options are so far from mutually exclusive. The whole reason you set a story in a zombie apocalypse is so you can test characters to the limit and gradually reveal their true selves. The crumbling of society and harsh survival all serves the purpose of stripping humans down to their base humanity. The zombies are purposely uninteresting, unrelenting, braindead threats so you can focus on fleshing out characters and having them prove themselves. It's the perfect backdrop for an epic character piece. Every good zombie movie knows it, and hell, this show even knows it. They are just bad at it.

That said, I'm still holding out hope for them getting their **** together.

This is something I noticed too and it was really poor writing. Dale was up on the vehicle keeping watch and you could see for a **** of a long ways and all of the sudden they had hundreds of zombies up on them.

Great show but hopefully they clean up the ******ed **** like this

See, i dont mind lolsy character writing, bc it makes the show entertaining to me in a different way. But this is just wrong. The problem was they stood around doing nothing with no action for most of S2, so the entire focus was on character development. Gimme hoardes of zombies chasing people like season 1 and I dont rly care how ******ed Lori is.

Exactly. theginger and whoever else thinks this show is as good as it gets for zombie character writing need to watch Dead Set and some of the other great zombie stuff out there.

This show is definitely not full of drama. Almost nothing at all happened last season and many episodes only had a few zombies. They say they are fixing the pacing going forward though so I am actually optimistic the prison stuff could get good.

Dead Set is great, but putting it out there as some kind of pinnacle of writing characters in a zombie show is pretty weak. There is very little character development and most of the characters are one note stereotypes.

Any TV premise can allow for interesting characters if the writing is good and you have talented actors. A salesperson or taxi driver can be fascinating when the right people are behind them just as a superhero can be boring and mundane in the wrong hands. There's nothing about the zombie apocalypse premise itself that says dialogue and characters have to be stupid and the plot slow and weak. TWD has a classic sci-fi premise, it's just executed poorly.

Yeah my post was a little off base, should have been more specific. I'm not really a horror fan and probably haven't seen a lot of the best zombie stuff out there. I agree that it is a good premise for a character piece, but I suppose there's probably a reason why most of the more good, character-based zombie fiction that's out there isn't as popular as TWD. After a certain point, most people (read: casual viewers) just want to see zombies getting their heads blown off, so what I should have said was "it's a show about a zombie apocalypse aimed at a fairly mainstream audience of 7-9 million people". The parameters of making a really popular TV show are a little restrictive.

Could we list some more good zombie stuff. I am loving zombie media now (TWD, left for dead 2, DayZ) and I would love to hear what you guys think are good dramatic zombie shows with long story arcs. I am definitely gonna check out dead set but I feel like zombie movies mostly fall into the terrible shoot millions of zombies territory of stuff like 28 days (weeks) later. Although that stuff certainly has its charms.

Wait wat??

I'm going to assume you've watched very little tv.

Many of us were speculating about this from the first episode. The most unsurprising scene ever and I'm pretty sure I literally LOL'd at how ridiculous it was.

Have some of you played the video game? It actually surprised me, pretty cool for a point & click game and it's much better than the show. You have to make a lot of quick decisions which alter the story of the game.

It's being released in five ~2 hour episodes, with the third one coming out this month.

Game spoiler about that picture:

except it isn't entertaining (well it kind of is because it is so bad), the drama is not interesting or important and it isn't suspenseful at all

lol at this being as well as anyone could do, why would you say that?

Yeah people are dumb, but they're survivors. I don't think it's too much to ask for to have bad ass cops and bikers set up a minimal defense, consider gathering readily available supplies, or maybe have any kind of plan.


Watching them fortify the magic farm may not have been great TV but it would've been better than the silly arguements and dirty looks that this show is.

lolwat?

28 weeks may fall more into the category of "shoot millions of zombies", but 28 days certainly doesn't, and even so, calling either "terrible" while praising TWD is perplexing to anyone with half a brain.

Exactly.

Sure, we're being nits in this thread. But that's because this shows commitment to awfulness extends beyond inconsistent characters and leaden plotting, it literally extends all the way down to "how does the morning after pill work" and "how many shots did Rick fire in the last episode" and "does alcohol make you drunk".

I don't expect everything to be Citizen ****ing Kane but come on. Meet me halfway.

Dead Set, for example, does. It has shallow one note characters, but at least they stick to the same ****ty one note from scene to scene. There's an identifiable protagonist who isn't a ****ing ******. Entire scenes go by without arguments about feelings.

Yes people disagree with you must ignorant of television. Anyway have fun trolling walking dead, see you guys in the season 3 thread. I'm too late to this party to write a proper defense.

Terrible was probably the wrong word. The first one was good but it didn't have the deepest characterization, second one was entertaining but nothing special.

Ya this was pretty cool little game. More like an interactive comic than full featured adventure game but I like the bioware type consequences without the plodding rpg gameplay. I like how the dialog choices have a timer.

For sure.. I pretty much agree with this, except I think both were better than you appear to think they were. The first one was by far the better movie, though. Small budgets surely aren't easy to work with, but they are excellent at trimming unnecessary, frivolous extras, and thereby bringing the strong points to the surface.

It really isn't bad, just okay. But it draws in the fanboys that put everything under their maginfy glass. If the fans of Desperate Housewives posted on message boards then they'd probably discover that it had awful writing.

There should be a separate OOTV called nitOOTV, with clones of all the normal threads, and the nits can go there and nit it up all day long with each other instead of nitting up the regular threads for the rest of us.

you do realize that "the rest of us" is the minority on this forum, right?

This show seems to be very divisive, it would be interesting to see a poll thread. Imdb has TWD at 8.7, I think that's way to high but there is obviously something more substantial going on in this show than the haters like to think.

there is a world outside of nit picky ooters

Try the breaking bad thread. Its probably one of the worst tv threads on the internet

Once again, this is an internet forum dedicated to discussing TV shows. There are going to be extreme levels of nittery. Despite the BB thread being full of nitting, pretty much everyone in there thinks the show is amazing. But what we do is pick shows apart, that way we find small nuanced references and whatnot. Sometimes we also find flaws. That doesn't mean the show is bad. It's just what we do. However, this show is bad, and so the nitting concentrates on how awful it is, because there is so much to nit about.