PORCH PONDERINGS

The Walking Dead

PROMPT May 24th

Write about a movie or television show you watched recently that blew you away. What lessons can you learn from the show and incorporate into your own writing?


I used to watch ‘The Walking Dead’ every week. I enjoyed the early years of that drama. They had a great ensemble cast. It was truly the good guys versus the bad guys.

All the dystopian world we fear will come to pass. Zombies and world collapse. How are we to survive without a government and medical care and food supply and most of all, petroleum products.

But then somewhere along the line, they started veering off the path. It became more of a soap opera than it was before. The well-defined characters and drama became all muddled.

I know you cannot keep a TV show going for years and years before you have to change it up a bit. But I feel cheated. I feel it has ‘jumped the shark’, as they say. The characters have morphed and changed too much, probably to reach out to their perceived audience. The plot lines are going down strange and wandering paths.

I’m not sure what the writers think each week with these episodes. I know the original idea came from the graphic novel of the same name. It cannot be easy to transfer the thoughts of comics to the screen. Something has to be lost in translation.

So I no longer watch that show, ’The Walking Dead’ or its evil spawn ‘Fear the Walking Dead’, ‘Fear the Walking Dead The World Beyond’, and then there is the talk show that dissects each episode, ‘The Talking Dead’. That used to rule my Sunday night. But I can change, just as television is changing. More and more people want to watch movies, series, bits and bobs on their internet devices. I’m just glad I’m not in charge.

I guess you ‘make hay while the sun shines’. Oh the cliches I can think of here. So this show will eventually fall away, as all things do. There is a cult following, just like there was for ‘Star Trek’, for 'Happy Days’, for 'The Waltons’, for ‘Little House on the Prairie’. I know I am showing my bias and age with those old shows. But how I long to go back to those innocent times.

Beam me back, Scotty!