Has the Walking Dead always been a terrible show?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

We’ve gotten used to the fact that the quality of shows is getting better. Budgets are going up. There is stuff like Mad Men and Black Sails and Girls and Veep. Big epic stuff. I vaguely had the idea that The Walking Dead was supposed to be in the same league as those other shows.

I’ve only seen 3 or 4 episodes of The Walking Dead, and that was years ago. I’m not especially into zombie movies, but some of the tension between the characters seem like it had potential to be interesting.

The other night I caught an episode called “Just Some Guy”. Whoa! It was really awful. Like the kind of bad TV I watched as a kid 20 or 30 years ago. Really bad television, with characters that do strange things for no reason. It had a focus on violence, but no attempt at the naturalism of Saving Private Ryan. It was just silly. At one point a guy on the backup of a pickup truck has a machine gun and sprays bullets out of the the back of the truck, and another guy, who is on a motorcycle, chasing the truck, is somehow, miraculously spared from the deadly fire. I’ve read enough about World War I to know a soldier with a machine gun can hold a fairly wide territory against enemy attack. The idea that the guy on the motorcycle would survive that is very difficult to believe.

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