Review: 'The Walking Dead'

By Don M. Ventura

AMC's new series The Walking Dead starts with a powerful punch to set it apart from anything on television before we flashback to kinder gentler times when zombies aren’t walking around... dead.

We open with deputy Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) commiserating over his marital problems with his best friend, and fellow deputy, Shane (Jon Bernthal). According to his wife Lori he doesn’t care enough, he doesn’t speak enough, and has a propensity for leaving the lights on when he leaves a room. The battle between men and women continues.

Rick is soon shot in the line of duty and awakens some time later alone in the hospital. All alone. Things have changed since Rick was shot and it’s unclear to the poor deputy just how much.

The Walking Dead is the adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s long-running comic book of the same name. In the book Kirkman asks what happens to everyone after a zombie movie ends? How do they survive? What choices do they make? Who do they become?

We begin to get a taste of that here in this fantastic debut by Director and Producer Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile). This series is in the ablest of hands, and Darabont demonstrates his affinity both for horror and (more importantly) drama. For the uninitiated, The Walking Dead has been more about the drama then it is the horror—but make not mistake, it is pretty horrific.

There is no pulling of punches in the story. Viewers are treated to some pretty nightmarish imagery: a little girl with a mangled face, a suffering female zombie dragging her body (everything below the torso missing), and a number of shots to the head. If you’ve seen Darabont’s The Mist, you’d know he doesn’t have a problem with gore.

Lincoln is well cast as Rick Grimes, a sort of Rip Van Winkle who immediately begin a quest to locate his wife Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) and their son Carl (Chandler Riggs). Lincoln spends about a third of the episode without anyone to act against and evokes precisely what you would expect: confusion, dread, and eventually sadness as he comes to realize he is not immediately going to be reunited with his family.

In a film you get a feel for how terrible the characters’ predicament is. As the story unfolds as a series, you get the sense of what a nightmare this world is. Lennie Jones and Adrian Kali Turner play a father and son who take in Rick after first mistaking him for a zombie. Jones gets some of the best scenes in the episode as he deals with the ramifications of his deceased wife in the world chronicled in this series.

To say there is nothing on television like The Walking Dead is a hyperbole-free statement. For horror fans and fans of the comic book, this is faithful interpretation of the book. For fans of good drama, well, let’s hope you can see past the blood and guts for what is really at the core of the series.

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on AMC.