Not interested in having Neal jump my slot again, Culturology is back with what Vanilla Ice might have called a "brand new adventure," but I'll call "more complaints about stuff that most people think is just fine." Namely: the zombie TV show that was just on and so popular, The Walking Dead.
Is it just me, or was this show popular because people like Mad Men and Breaking Bad so much? Like, people want so badly for there to be good programming on cable television, that they just will themselves into believing that a show which is mediocre at best is one of the great achievements of contemporary televised entertainment. Now, I like zombies as much as the next person, and I think there are probably are interesting things to be said about the current trend of putting the "geist" back into "zeitgeist," but, having gone ahead and jumped on this bandwagon, and watched all six episodes of The Walking Dead, I'm mostly left scratching my head about what people see in this.
The biggest thing that I see is what South Park figured out years ago: the conservative powers that run our censorship boards don't mind grotesque violence. There's a massive double standard between censorship of violence and censorship of sex or speech acts. So zombies are pretty much the safest vehicle for cutting edge cable-TV violence, since they don't have sex and don't talk. In a lot of ways, The Walking Dead is about little more than acts of "Look what we can show on cable TV nowadays! Amazing!" It does nothing new for the zombie genre, nor for the TV drama genre, or anything else, other than there's lots and lots of rotting flesh and gun shots to human skulls. I haven't read the comic book, but I presume a lot of the flat-ness of the zombie mythology is they fault of the book, and not the TV show.
Again, there are probably interesting questions to ask about zombies, so maybe this show was an excuse for zombie nerds to talk about zombies? I'm not really a zombie nerd. I don't really want to talk about it.
We say: Honestly, was there ever really a doubt? Avatar has been an AudioShocker favorite since before there was an AudioShocker.com! This Nickelodeon original made us sit up and take notice with its tremendous visuals, compelling story, and surprisingly mature themes. We're sad we couldn't give Chuck and Mad Men higher marks, but Buster Bluth and Don Draper would want it this way. Now we're keeping our eyes peeled for new episodes of Big Love, BSG, Entourage, and Spectacular Spidey!
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