By Ricky Young.
Things have changed. A bit.
When we last talked about AMC’s The Walking Dead on MostlyFilm, we spent most of the article agog at how a programme so filled with desperate and throbbing flaws could continue to be such a mega-hit.
Make no mistake – and broadsheet media-section column inches be damned – this is by far AMC’s biggest show. Yes, they have Mad Men, of course, watched by Mark Lawson, Mark Lawson’s cat, Mark Lawson’s commissioning editor and absolutely nobody else. They had Breaking Bad, which managed a degree of cultural significance by repackaging the good bits of The Shield half-a-decade later, and whose ludicrously hype-drenched finale was watched by a supposedly epic 10.3 million viewers.
Want to know something? Thirteen out of The Walking Dead’s sixteen third-season episodes beat the ass off that. More people regularly tuned in to watch Egg out of This Life get chased by golems again than could be bothered finding out what ended up happening to Walter White. (Spoiler: He returned to his own planet.)
People sure do love the heck out of zombies, it seems. But, like a creeping, tenacious infection, spreading from a single starting point and extending its influence into multiple parts of the whole, this year The Walking Dead showed signs of an extremely worrying and unexpected new symptom.
Competence.
MostlyFilm 