Dead and loving it

Did any of you watch The Walking Dead last night on AMC? The confrontations in the gory, intense premiere episode certainly were of a, ahem... different variety than the confrontations we were used to seeing in Don Draper's office from week to week on Mad Men. But still as good.

Looking back on my previous post, which reviewed the first compilation of comic book issues of The Walking Dead, I see that I really didn't tell you all that much about the story's plot or characters. That's because the review originally appeared on Amazon and Amazon's product description took care of that. I've since learned to put basic plot and character information in my Amazon reviews even if Amazon's own info covers those things, allowing me to reprint my Amazon reviews elsewhere and have them still be useful, or at the very least make sense.

In any event, if you watched the grim and gritty premiere of the show, you know that the initial storyline (in both comic book and television adaptation) revolves around sheriff's deputy Rick Grimes waking up from a coma caused by a gunshot wound, only to discover that while he was down for the count the world has been overrun by, well... the walking dead. He soon begins to form allies among the ragtag humans scattered about, with everybody trying to survive while forming some semblance of normal human relationships to make life in the zombie-infested world worth living. To give you a mild spoiler, seeing the shell-shocked and beaten down remnants of humanity trying to make a go of things as the months go by, often with little success, perhaps demonstrates that the title The Walking Dead doesn't just refer to the zombies.

My own take was that the opening episode was terrific: like its source material, it was scary and gory, yet also character-driven and often quite moving. But the episode was definitely intense, and I'll be interested to see if viewers can take a steady diet of Rick Grimes and his friends navigating the zombie apocalypse week in and week out.