This is AMC's baby, no way they are letting it die. Stuff it full of filler and drag it out for ever is more like it. The show is setting basic cable records and its audience was actually growing through the third season. That's pure gold in TV land. Something like three or four people watch WD for every viewer who tunes into the very expensive to produce "Boardwalk Empire." By comparison, "Lost" went into a viewership slide by this point. Most complicated plot serialized shows do not add new viewership but WD keeps building an audience; so expect at least 100 episodes. In this era of open hostility between red and blue state citizens, in a culture celebrating ruthless greed, where shows about hoarders and doomsday preppers are so popular that we apparently need a dozen or so and where yet another bird flu pandemic is unfolding as I type.....why wouldn't this show resonate with a big audience. Not to repeat the point, but, if it's a sci-fi level of consistency and zombie realism and nonstop zombie skull smashing you want, this show will probably disppoint you. They already went to the CDC and snuffed out that whole sci-fi element by first stating the plague was unbeatable and then blowing the CDC to smithereens in case you missed the point. Science will not come to the rescue, its not part of the show. Then the show quickly became centered around man's conflicted impulses towards civilization and morality, i.e. man vs man and man vs himself conflicts.
After about the fourth or fifth episode where Dale and Shane were going at it, I was like, yes, I too read "Lord of the Flies", half the english speaking world reads it in middle school....move the fuck on with some, uh, I dunno.....plot and action? Such a relief to see Dale getting disemboweled. But there needs to be some depth or its just repetative action. Consider another apocalypse story that sort of informs the world of WD. "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome" had more budget than "Mad Max" and "The Road Warrior" combined. There's a reason the first two films are hailed as classics and Thunderdome is just a bloated, forgettable piece of shit. What with the popularity of doomsday and all, wouldn't you know it ... "Mad Max 4: Fury Road" is on the way, in 3D, of course.
Bookmarks