More Damn, Dirty Zombies

by Gary Phillips

Sunday night I watched the season finale of The Walking Dead. This is the new series on AMC based on the ongoing comic book by writer Robert Kirkman and artists Charles Adlard and Tony Moore. Begun in 2003 under the Image Comics banner, the comic book series won the Eisner award (named for comics pioneer writer-artist Will Eisner, who created The Spirit among other characters) for best continuing series at this year’s Comic-Con. In brief, the story is about a group of individuals in and around Atlanta who are thrown together after a virus or some damn kind of infection turns cherry pie eating, front lawn watering friends and neighbors into slavering, flesh lusting ghouls.

Kirkman is one of the executive producers of the TV show overseen by filmmaker Frank Darabont.  The Walking Dead has been a ratings champ, at least in the relative basic cable arena of AMC.  5.3 million viewers were on hand for the 90-minute premiere telecast during Halloween, with 3.6 of those millions in the 18 to 49-year-old demographic—the only demo networks care about, as this is the target group for advertisers.  The fifth episode, “Wildfire,” jumped up to something like 5.6 million viewers.  Given each episode also repeats twice the same night, the estimate is the cumulative audience is over 8 million.  The last episode for this season, the sixth one, had 6 million viewers with 4 million of those among the desired demographic.

By comparison, the premiere of this season’s Mad Men on AMC drew around 2.9 million and Breaking Bad (one of my favorite shows, about a middle-aged high school chemistry teacher who, suffering from lung cancer, gets into the meth trade to leave money for his family with darkly comic results) was 2 million. But as I wrote last year, there was zombification going on in our pop culture then and it hasn’t let up. Could be there’s some deeper meaning at work here. Signaled by the rise of the teabaggers, the right-wing’s insistence of slavish devotion to its way or the highway has bred zombie-like adherents. Who once they run out of leftie and liberal psyches to consume, will eventually eat themselves.

Or maybe we just can’t get enough of motherfuckin’ zombies all the motherfuckin’ time.

Several commentators on comics sites such as Newsarama and Comic Book Resources speculate that The Walking Dead’s success will breed imitators on TV, but I doubt it. I mean you’ve seen one series about ordinary people trying to survive in a land gone zombie, you’ve pretty much seen them all, haven’t you? Indeed I’m not the only one to note that there’s a lot of hand wringing and fretting going on in Walking Dead, and not a whole lot of brain munching and face chewing by ravenous fiends.

The finale is a good example of the tack the show has taken of less gore and more angst. The survivors have managed to reach the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), figuring to find shelter and maybe a few answers to the zombie plague. Not to go into all of the interpersonal dramas that have been playing out, but one of the survivors, Andrea, had to in a previous episode, blow her baby sis’ brains out after she got bit and started to zombie-up after the zombies, walkers they call them, attacked their camp. Naturally she’s a bit overwrought about this. Then there’s the little matter of Shane Walsh having shagged his partner Rick Grimes’ wife Lori after telling her ol’ Rick was dead ... only he wasn’t.

Shane and Rick were sheriff’s deputies and in the opening, Rick is in a coma after a shootout. The waking out of a coma in a hospital by the protagonist, seen in the comic book too, was apparently lifted from 2002’s 28 Days Later—which is now a comic book as well. We learn in the season finale Shane tried to get his buddy out of the hospital while soldiers in camo and gas masks went through the corridor blasting their assault rifles at anything that moved. Shane left Rick thinking he’d expired. Anyway, Rick doesn’t know about this adventure of his wife and his friend, and Shane still has a thing for Lori. Though given he tried to rape her unsuccessfully, that fire is sure out for one of them.

Most of the finale takes place inside a computer-controlled bunker in the bowels of the CDC where via another survivor, Dr. Jenner, there’s exposition about the zombiepocolypse, some drinking and hot showers. But of course the good times can’t last and suffice it to say things go up in a big fireball at the end, with most of our crew back on the road again until next season. There wasn’t much in the way of zombies stompin’ in this episode but there was a cryptic moment right before the explosion. Jenner, facing his doom, whispers something to Grimes but we don’t know what that was yet.

In the comics there’s a bigger cast of characters and situations to play off of. Like the dictator who styled himself the Governor and ran his four blocks of an abandoned neighborhood of survivors with an iron hand. I suppose partly due to budget matters, it’s harder to introduce these kind of storylines in the television version as you’d need to be having a greater number of extras, bigger fight scenes and what have you. I guess too the decision to ration the carnage in favor of more characterization was for practical reasons related to budget, and the idea that too much bloodshed could get old in a weekly format.

Though as the entertaining movie Zombieland showed, you can have your pathos, humor and zombie bodies piled high. The heroes in this flick journey to Pacific Playland, an amusement park, a haven in L.A. that is rumored to be zombie-free. Of course it isn’t but along the way there our survivors encounter Bill Murray playing himself ensconced in his Beverly Hills mansion.

A rather interesting take on the zombie bit is I, Zombie, a new comic book series from Vertigo/DC. The book, by Chris Roberson and Michael Allred, centers around Gwen Dylan, who is a gravedigger by trade in Eugene, Oregon. Good thing as our girl has to eat a human brain (she digs up the fresh dead for this necessity) once a month to keep from going all zombie and losing her mind and good looks. Once she chows down, she gets the memories of the dead person. She then sets out to solve any funky shit that might have put the deceased in their grave. There’s vampires, ghosts, ancient Egyptian mythology, dog boys and other supernaturalisms populating the series.

Too bad I couldn’t have counseled The Edge and Bono not to finagle $65 million of people they know’s monies into their Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark musical that needs to bring in a mil or so a week to break even. What with its intricate mechanics of pulleys, gears and wires, fancy sets and having to have Spidey and his villains swing and fly overhead, shoot webbing and bolts of electricity and whatnot, cast members pulling shoulders out of sockets and breaking wrists, they could have done Zombie: The Shambles for peanuts. A man, a woman, a zombie king or queen, and extras for zombies plus a desolate set. See there’s this dedicated hope-to-die lesbian and a sexist out of work auto worker who are thrown together as possibly the last two on earth and have to battle zombies and each other to survive.

Killer. 

Lastly, a toast to Terriers, never a ratings giant on FX like Walking Dead, but one heck of a wry, contrary episodic about two scruffy unlicensed PIs doing their thing in a thinly disguised San Diego called Ocean Beach.  Gonna miss that show.  Read more about them here.

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