Okay, I have a few observations about The Walking Dead, season 2.
First off? Awesome! Watching the piss out of it. Zombie horror in a tv format. Good stuff.
Now here's where it sucks: the writing. It's same old song and dance with all half-functioning television shows: the writing suffers because it attempts to reach out to too many audiences at once, fully reaching none.
Additionally, the plot seems stuck in a rut, mired in its unnecessary soap opera drama bull spit that, I argue, would not likely happen in a hypothetically real zombie apocalypse.
If you were forced to kill mass numbers of living-dead corpses of people you knew, and of just anyone at all, you'd be pretty traumatized, and I feel that everyone's relationships with one another would be the lowest priority. They'd develop on their own, without having to spend every other scene talking about it deeply and emotionally.
The writing lacks bite and distinctiveness. It's dumned down for the lowest-common-denominator-watcher, and why not? It's how a show makes money, isn't it? Great system--we get almost-great tv out of it.
I was thinking that if I wrote the episodes, I'd have characters fuckin doin all sortsa cool shit!
No just kidding I don't know how to write for tv. But that might make it cool.
Haven't studies shown that women watch tv for emotional moments, and men watch it for the action, basically? I know what to watch out for, and how to avoid cliché. I could re-write the whole damn season 2.
You know what? I bet the writers could, too--without pressure to make it widely marketable.
1. Have you noticed how almost every single scene ends with someone walking away from another?
Here's an average scene: Two people talking. It gets emotional. Exit one of the two, as if they've got some place to be. The one left stares after the other, in a daze.
2. All the scary moments are more like, Boo!, as in, Hey you're startled now! Not like, really disturbing like zombies would be. It was cool when that one was ripping its own face off, trying to get into the car that Lori rolled off the road and passed out in.
3. Not a criticism--a cool, awesome thing--you know when Andrea and Shane were out practicing target practice in the woods, and she couldn't hit the moving log? Then they go out and find some actual zombies, and she starts shooting them in the face effortlessly and entering a zen state, just fuckin blastin those bitches like a stone cold cleansing killer for justice, and though she only barely hears Shane telling her that they've gotta get out of there, but she's so fucking zen that even though she's totally distracted, she totally hears it and responds, but only to the hood of the car, and she turns around and lets the crowd of zombies get closer, she points the gun, gets this I'm-gonna-slaughter-you-all face on, and the scene ends?
That was awesome.
It was that playing with audio to convey how she found out how to let go of her emotions, take it easy, and point and shoot, right for the skull, remorselessly, as relentlessly as them, losing a piece of her humanity, but was it a weakness? was it worth it to lose it?, that I found captivating.
Which was a nice surprise, cause before,
4. Andrea was the show's useless angry bitch character who just hated everything, and didn't seem like the professional civil rights attorney her character is supposed to be. Does every show have to have a bitch? I'm so sick of that character. They don't exist in real life.
5. They shoot off guns too often, wasting ammo, and not enough walkers come looking for them when they do.
6. There's a group of marauding boys, going around killing and looting the living? During a zombie apocalypse? Not trying to get away from the zombies, but just travelling around, looking for people to rob, when there's scores of abandoned places with shit just for the taking? Right.
But hey, it fills a plot hole, right? I'm about four episodes away from the end of the season, and Rick, Hershel and Glenn just brought back some kid named Randall after Rick FUCKING BADASSLY RIPPED HIS LEG BACK OFF THAT POST.
First off? Awesome! Watching the piss out of it. Zombie horror in a tv format. Good stuff.
Now here's where it sucks: the writing. It's same old song and dance with all half-functioning television shows: the writing suffers because it attempts to reach out to too many audiences at once, fully reaching none.
Additionally, the plot seems stuck in a rut, mired in its unnecessary soap opera drama bull spit that, I argue, would not likely happen in a hypothetically real zombie apocalypse.
If you were forced to kill mass numbers of living-dead corpses of people you knew, and of just anyone at all, you'd be pretty traumatized, and I feel that everyone's relationships with one another would be the lowest priority. They'd develop on their own, without having to spend every other scene talking about it deeply and emotionally.
The writing lacks bite and distinctiveness. It's dumned down for the lowest-common-denominator-watcher, and why not? It's how a show makes money, isn't it? Great system--we get almost-great tv out of it.
I was thinking that if I wrote the episodes, I'd have characters fuckin doin all sortsa cool shit!
No just kidding I don't know how to write for tv. But that might make it cool.
Haven't studies shown that women watch tv for emotional moments, and men watch it for the action, basically? I know what to watch out for, and how to avoid cliché. I could re-write the whole damn season 2.
You know what? I bet the writers could, too--without pressure to make it widely marketable.
More, numbered criticisms:
1. Have you noticed how almost every single scene ends with someone walking away from another?
Here's an average scene: Two people talking. It gets emotional. Exit one of the two, as if they've got some place to be. The one left stares after the other, in a daze.
"I've gotta go be alone now because talking and not storming off would help us resolve our differences, which would throw a wrench in the gears of this show's entire wide-market appeal!"
2. All the scary moments are more like, Boo!, as in, Hey you're startled now! Not like, really disturbing like zombies would be. It was cool when that one was ripping its own face off, trying to get into the car that Lori rolled off the road and passed out in.
3. Not a criticism--a cool, awesome thing--you know when Andrea and Shane were out practicing target practice in the woods, and she couldn't hit the moving log? Then they go out and find some actual zombies, and she starts shooting them in the face effortlessly and entering a zen state, just fuckin blastin those bitches like a stone cold cleansing killer for justice, and though she only barely hears Shane telling her that they've gotta get out of there, but she's so fucking zen that even though she's totally distracted, she totally hears it and responds, but only to the hood of the car, and she turns around and lets the crowd of zombies get closer, she points the gun, gets this I'm-gonna-slaughter-you-all face on, and the scene ends?
That was awesome.
It was that playing with audio to convey how she found out how to let go of her emotions, take it easy, and point and shoot, right for the skull, remorselessly, as relentlessly as them, losing a piece of her humanity, but was it a weakness? was it worth it to lose it?, that I found captivating.
Which was a nice surprise, cause before,
4. Andrea was the show's useless angry bitch character who just hated everything, and didn't seem like the professional civil rights attorney her character is supposed to be. Does every show have to have a bitch? I'm so sick of that character. They don't exist in real life.
5. They shoot off guns too often, wasting ammo, and not enough walkers come looking for them when they do.
6. There's a group of marauding boys, going around killing and looting the living? During a zombie apocalypse? Not trying to get away from the zombies, but just travelling around, looking for people to rob, when there's scores of abandoned places with shit just for the taking? Right.
But hey, it fills a plot hole, right? I'm about four episodes away from the end of the season, and Rick, Hershel and Glenn just brought back some kid named Randall after Rick FUCKING BADASSLY RIPPED HIS LEG BACK OFF THAT POST.
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