Amph The Walking Dead and Spinoffs on AMC

I DVR'ed the episode and I got maybe 2 minutes in and I just couldn't. Maybe I'll give it another try, but based off of the few comments above, I think I'm going to hate it. The mom character is played by Kim Dickens, right? I'm not a fan of hers in the first place. Sons, Gone Girl, House of Cards...don't like her.

 

The writing was pretty awful, and I think we're back to the old black people getting eaten first and most often meme. The only zombie virus that does racial profiling. But apparently it set some kind of basic cable ratings record. Walking Dead is a bullet proof brand for the moment.

 

I enjoyed it. It started very very slowly but picked up speed in the second half.


I agree with the racist virus though, I did notice that.


It's worth a punt on a few episodes and see how it pans out.

 

agreed. I also have a low threshold for being entertained by zombies and will keep watching for now.

 

I didn't notice any racism behind the virus's motives.

 

you also thought the show was written well

 

I'm going to give it a couple more episodes if only for tiny DeppFranco's acting.

 

I finished watching the pilot episode and I agree it's a slow burn. I really didn't like the first episode because I didn't find any of the characters all that likable and the story wasn't all that compelling.

I felt the previews at the end of the pilot episode was too revealing and spoiled alot. Regardless, I'm committed to watch the entire season.

 

The zombie virus is that racist it could be a republican.

 

Regardless of any "racist" undertones that may or may not exist, I thought the episode was just dreadfully boring. I will certainly tune in for a couple more episodes, but so far I struggled to care about any of the characters. My understanding is the product is more of a character study than a zombie-apocalypse story, and after 5 seasons of dreadful pacing with TWD I certainly wasn't expecting much in the way of zombie "action", but it would have been nice to make at least one of the characters.... likable?

I can't fault them for their attempts at making the characters "relatable", as that family dynamic is certainly common, and in fact shares many similarities with my own family dynamic growing up (I live in Los Angeles too). I just just couldn't... care... about any of them. I'm hoping that after the next couple of episodes I can clarify my own thoughts as to why I am so apatehtic to these charcters in particular.

For now I'm certainly rooting for the virus.

 

For a high school counselor the mom/wife character is a really terrible listener. Your son says he's witnessed a cannibal murder. It's likely he's insane. Then your husband investigates and says, indeed, the place where the son says it all went down looks like the possible scene of a cannibalistic murder, and you're like "that's what all druggie flophouses look like! fuggetaboutit!"

 

She took that poor kid's weapon, too... bitch.

 

That kid should have kept the 73 cents.

 

The mom got in the cops face like she was someone with power over them. That's not how you talk to the police.

 

i'm less optimistic about the outlook of the show when i realize that she's more than likely our rick

 

It's too early to tell... I'll give it a few more weeks.

 

They could all die by the end of the season.

 

Especially the LAPD, they would seriously arrest you if you did that.

 

This show sucks so much.

 

The guy who plays Nick needs to practice sounding American when he's playing upset. During that whole sequence when he was trying to stop his sister from leaving, he sounded like a full-on Brit.


I guess this guy played Tom Riddle in HBP.

 

There is something wrong with the pacing if you can set the playback speed to 1.5x and it still seems unbearably slow. And my god, the "acting" from the extras just before the "riot" started. That was the best they could come up with?

I really want to like this show. Why do they make it so hard?

 

I'm entertained by zombies in almost any context, including stripper zombies and nazi zombies, but this show seems determined to test my boundaries.

One of the hardest hurdles in zombieland is plausibly explaining how a toxic bite from a slow moving reanimated corpse can bring down civilization. Walking Dead was smart enough to skip this step. And a lot of movies do that as well. We don't see it happen, so we can suspend our skepticism. But Fear is determined to show us the process, and they are really, really going the extra mile to make it look dumb. Government conspiracy/coverup plus denial doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of a social media equipped society. They could have been clever in other ways like taking a satirical look at social media meme spreading, as happens sometimes even in rock bottom budget schlock horror movies, but no. There's no clever to be had anywhere in this production.

I hate to say it but this series could use the guidance of a good underlying comic book.

 

My impressions after watching the second episode:

- Okay, during the first episode I didn't see any skin color bias concerning the virus, as the very first zombie you see happens to be white. But after the second episode, I'm forced to concede that the zombie virus seems prone to overtake black people with greater immediacy and frequency.

- I still don't hate it like many of you do. Maybe it's because of my enchantment with the Walking Dead TV brand, but I'm still enjoying it. My only complaint is the mom. She's utterly stupid. And her profession is guidance counselor. A guidance counselor that can't even communicate with her own daughter about the severity of what's happening.
Her daughter: "What's going on? What's happening?"
Mom's response: *Silent blank look*
Her daughter: "Okay, well, I'm going to go outside to help our neighbors, then..."
Mom: "Noooo!"
Daughter: "Why?!"
Mom: *Silent blank look*

And the school scene with the principal. Seriously? That paranoid kid has more sense than this woman. And she's already seen a zombie--plus she just heard one over the intercom! But no, let's go investigate and get up real close and endanger this kid's life with reckless stupidity!

This mom is about as annoying as Andrea from the Walking Dead.

 

In the first episode when everyone was talking about the bug going around and that so many kids were missing school, I was thinking to myself "Aha, a killer flu or something took down the majority of people to bring on the first big wave of zombies".

But now I think they're saying the entire school came down with a bad case of zombie bites and somehow that never made the news.