Why I Love The Walking Dead

By Rob Boggan

One of last year’s biggest TV shows The Walking Dead premiered it’s mid season finale last night and my God, what a doozy. There was the perfect blend of melancholy and mayhem all laced together to bring in one final holy crap moment at the end. This is what TV shows are supposed to do, especially shows of this caliber; They are supposed to draw you in, build up your hopes and then burn them to the ground. There has been plenty of shows that have done this in the past, but none have the potential to do it on the scale that The Walking Dead does. Plenty of shows have always invoked the “nobody is safe” mantra, but as we seen last night (if you caught the show that is…) they really mean it on this show.

There’s always the constant feeling of danger lurking right around the corner in every episode, and the writers usually do a great job of drawing you in with the suspense. The biggest bonus behind the show, is that while it is based off of Robert Kirkman’s wildly popular comic, it does not directly follow it. Case and point; One of the TV series biggest love/hate characters is Rick’s right hand man Shane. In the TV show, Shane adds the perfect amount of chaos, all the while providing enough badassery to be an extremely valuable asset to the group. In the comic, Shane actually gets killed off very early on in the series while the survivors are camped. Darryl Dixon, another fan favorite from the TV series doesn’t even exist in the comic world but also provides a great story arc to the show. This is awesome because now the writers don’t have to feel as rushed to bring in some of the heavier hitters from the comic immediately to the show. By doing this, we get to see some awesome character development that the comic just doesn’t provide, and it adds a more realistic feeling to the whole zombie apocalypse scenario.

If you haven’t yet read the comic, do yourself a favor and pick it up, you won’t regret it. Those who haven’t yet seen the show (all two of you) it is definitely worth a viewing especially if you, like myself, are an avid fan of the zombie genre. Either way, it’s definitely a great show derived from a great comic, and both directly benefit from a great story. What say you out there? Anybody else like the show? Any of you hate it? Sound off in the comments and let yourself be heard