Next Sunday, AMC’s The Walking Dead
returns to live television, and its legion of fans can’t wait to veg out and
eat up the season six premier. I have been accused of cultural elitism from
time to time, but no show has gotten its teeth into to me the way The Walking Dead has. It’s so delicious,
and there’s no obvious reason why its hoard of fans are drawn to it. The Walking Dead, while well-made, falls
short of shows like Breaking Bad and Sherlock in terms of quality: Andrew
Lincoln isn’t likely to steal any Oscars from Benedict Cumberbatch. Likewise, TWD—by necessity—falls short of a
franchise like Star Trek in terms of
vision: the characters are cut off from any sense of larger humanity. They
cannot know what has happened to their world nor seek to fix it. Rather than a
grand vision of an optimistic interstellar future a la Trek, TWD is an intimate peephole
unto the end of our race. It’s kinda depressing actually, at least on the
surface of it. So why is it that next Sunday by 8 PM, come hell or high water,
I, along with a massive herd of Americans, am going to throw my phone in the
other room and park my ass on the couch to take in this grim vision of our fleeting
future? Indeed, anyone who doesn’t watch the show must be wondering what all
the fuss is about. What's the big deal? I have wondered myself…
While the dystopian vision of the
end is as old as Science Fiction itself (consider, for example, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which is in turn
predated by Mary Shelley’s The Last Man),
anyone who’s been paying attention has noticed a proliferation of
post-apocalyptic books, film, and TV since the release of the expanded edition
of Stephen King’s The Stand in 1990. For
some reason in the 90s—which gave us Deep
Impact and Armageddon—we were
really concerned with asteroids and, more importantly, avoiding the onset of
the apocalypse. Since the millennium, we’ve become obsessed with survival after
the end. Prominent examples include 28
Days Later (and its sequel), the completion of The Matrix franchise (begun in 1999), The Day After Tomorrow, Snowpiercer,
the Zac Snyder remake of George Romero’s The
Dawn of the Dead, the rebooting of the Mad
Max franchise, reality television’s Doomsday
Preppers, The CW’s teen targeted The
100, World War Z, Christopher
Nolan’s Interstellar, and Cormac
McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The
Road (and it’s film adaptation)…just to name more than a few.
