Patton Oswalt told a story on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee of a network note he got that said “The Hitler sketch is really funny, but does he have to be so anti-Semitic?”
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The Road? (sort of)
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The only moment I clearly remember from Season Two (the season that my sister-in-law refers to as “the farm where plot goes to die”) was the time they found a rather bloated zombie stuck in their well, and tried to extract him without further polluting it… and failed rather spectacularly.
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How would “zombie crime” work? Like, would zombies plan jewel heists or bank robberies? Or would some poor innocent zombie get framed for a string of vampire attacks? Would police interrogate suspects using some kind of “good cop, zombie cop” routine?
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That time was easily the series at its weakest. So much of it was laughably stupid, or just grindingly tedious. Unfortunately, horror as a genre suffers badly from a tropescape of people making exceedingly poor decisions to advance what little plot there is. The well business ranks up there in incredulity with the time Lori swerved her car to avoid hitting a zombie and somehow flipped her car over.
I think that they got closest to this in IIRC season three, with attempts at agriculture and illness which was not directly related to zombies - real survival challenges. Of course various reset buttons meant that those were no longer factors after that season’s resolution. I finally gave up on TWD about a year ago, more out of apathy than disgust, despite having seen some gradual tightening of focus and attempts at characterization.
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Star Trek came up with the Borg because the suits decided this was too gross:
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The borg are kind of scary, though. But I can see the zombie parallels (though I never really give it much thought before).
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Okay, these aren’t exactly Romero-sanctioned zombies, but…
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“Solve a zombie crime of the week”.
How do -I- fail upward like this?
I have known many, many talented writers, screenwriters, directors, producers who strive in obscurity. And then there’s this turd, here.
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Watched a few episodes of Last Ship, non zombie apocalypse, before deciding it was too dumb. Way too much macho bullshit and bad science. Revolution was just too dumb for words. When they destroyed the last operational steam locomotive on earth as a throwaway, I couldn’t take it.
How about A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Series? I’m sure some exec would say “sounds too Jewish”.
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Yeah, it’s happened more than once where just as things start moving in an interesting (yet inconveniently less-gory) direction, a season’s arc gets redirected. And a few too many horror tropes get explored that don’t really mean anything or add anything. The Terminus resolution: who thought that having a settlement turn cannibal was a remotely sustainable solution? I bet somebody here could figure out this answer: how many parties of ten would you have to kill to keep a settlement of twenty in Donaldburgers for a month? Unless you want to starve like a zombie, I don’t think turning cannibal is anything but an option of absolute last resort. But, y’know, it’s Super Scary, so let’s go for it.
I think the show is at its best on those occasions when it tries to realistically imagine what such a post-apocalypse might actually be like. But like you say, those threads never last. But I still like the show.
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To be fair, I think the zombie crime procedural i-Zombie is quite a charming show - but in that case the zombie is the detective…
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The raw amount of hope on that show is painful to watch.
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You think so? I think the characters are interesting, the reason for the zombification is interesting, and the stories stand enough on their own, but there is an overreaching arc. All of which keep me coming back…
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We could make a game of reinventing other shows.
- Gilligan’s Island is great, but do we need the whole shipwreck thing?
- I love Hogan’s Heroes, but can you have it set in a farm in Idaho instead?
- Mork and Mindy is good, but let’s make it a tense family drama.
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There’s one way I find them to be scarier than zombies: in Walking Dead, it’s a virus that re-animates a corpse. With Borg, they lose their individuality but are still alive and more or less conscious. They took it in a super-creepy direction in Voyager a couple of times. It’s not the most popular opinion of the Borg, that they’re techno-zombies, but imho First Contact is a zombie movie, and it’s an opinion allegedly shared with at least one Paramount exec.
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Not gonna lie. Would watch this.
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Thats interesting, possibly more terrifying too. zombie, but aware of it and having no control shudder
I still find the best zombie concept to be the one used by the last of us game though, for it’s based off something that already exists in nature…
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The supernatural cop buddy procedural thing has totally jumped the shark. I like Forever Knight vampire cop in the 90’s, but now it’s immortals (at least 3 shows), zombies and even Satan himself gumshoeing around.
I just can’t do the procedural anymore. I REALLY want to like Ripper Street, I love period stuff and I’d watch Jerome Flynn (Bronn) in anything, but I can’t take it.
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