The Walking Dead – Watching Out of Loyalty

Coming up on the season 7 finale this Sunday and hoping for 90 minutes of explosions and running and gunning and pacts being made and heroics and stuff. It won’t happen and I accept it. I don’t like it but it is what it is and that’s how it’s going to be.

I don’t hate the show, it’s the only show I regularly watch now. I’m going through an “old cranky man” phase and nothing on TV really excites me. My mid-life crisis (I’m turning 46 soon) consists of wanting to learn to do (craft) more things, Viking stuff, losing 100 pounds and getting fit, rationally being able to protect my family, table-top (miniature war toy soldier) gaming, collecting mess kits from military surplus, and getting back out into the woods and camping. Then I want to get a record player and some vinyl.

I still really want to buy a house too but that’s even bigger than my mid-life crisis. Hey… at least I’m not freaking out over red sports cars and 24 year old women and cocaine. I think the above list is reasonable.

Sitting down and burning up 6-8 hours a sitting bingeing some TV show is just not in my wheelhouse anymore. It was but not now. I also just finished (last year) the book The Revolution Was Televised. It is about the Golden Age of TV and, though it’s purpose is not to do so, it turned me off (tuned me out of?) TV today … satisfied I was there for the Golden Age that just happened a few years back.

I saw Deadwood, Breaking Bad, Sopranos, The Shield, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, and a few other shows on the Golden Age list and I was satisfied. Maybe I was spoiled too. I feel good about those shows and proud that I chose to watch them as they aired (mostly). I just really think the Golden Age is over and the new “norm” is kind of played and lame.

I’m like a TV hipster!!
“I liked The Wire before it became popular…”

So, my problem with AMC’s The Walking Dead is many faceted and a lot of it is my own fault:
1) I love the comic book and I will never be able to not compare the two.
2) The pace is slow. There is too much time spent on exposition.
3) Too much time is spent on showing us emotional impacts of events.

4) I feel pandered too. As someone once told me, “They are opening up your head and dumping into it.”. Tropes are being used to illicit canned emotional responses.

At least there has been less sweaty and bloody Rick Grimes.

I’m still going to watch it though. I still like it. Fear The Walking Dead too but I’m not too invested in that. At least it is not 100% tedious to me like Game of Thrones was, and that is most likely due to the fact I identify as a TWD fanboy and not a GoT fanboy.

I do still have some TV guilty pleasures though – the ABC family comedies. Thirty minutes long and funny, I watch Black’ish, Fresh Off the Boat, and Goldbergs. As for TWD… I still REALLY love the comic books and still subscribe to them and buy an occasional hardcover trade for my bookshelf.