The Walking Dead: Possibly the Best Show on Televison

I was waiting on the show to end before I wrote this and provide a retrospective on the show and why it is that I think that it was, during its time, the best show on television. But it seems that the end of The Walking Dead is impossible to truly predict with only outside information, so I'm going to start this now.

It's easy to say something is the best when a show that has the highest ratings for any cable television show before or since, but I fully intend to go into depth as to not only why it has the ratings it does, but to support my admittedly hyperbolic claim. Hopefully you will agree, and if you do not, you will at least see where my claim comes from.

Briefly, about myself and why I care about the subject at all. I am the lead developer of Outbreak: Undead and the public perception is that I must be a fan of all things zombie. This is actually not true. In fact, one of the crucial reasons that Outbreak: Undead has succeeded at all is that I channeled my disdain for the genere into the game like a disapproving father whose son decides to major in dance history. The quality of the game needed to be such that even my cold, didainful heart would melt tacking a subject that I find personally dry and truly predicitable.

It was not truly just a thought experiment. I do have a soft spot for the early Resident Evil games and have regrettably continued playing onward to the current iterations. The Walking Dead as a graphic novel series did catch my attention, but I'd be lying if I said I've read all of them. I certainly have not. The book Day by Day Armageddon was also a fun book, so the genere has some life beyond "shoot it in the head, keep it dead". They all have one critical thing in common though, the zombies HAVE TO be the least important part of any story the are a part of. Like any story, the characters in it need to be what is most important, and doing a piece of zombie fiction just to have something with zombies in it will suffer from the inevetable collap

se of storyline by focusing on the zombies, the transmission of any virus and how it came to be. The same ending is built into every story that neglects the characters in this way.

So this is an introduction, nothing more. Keep your eyes posted for Part 1 of this series, Surviving the First Season.