LITTLE ROCK — Let me get this out of the way right up front: The Walking Dead is for adults.
Or maybe really mature teens.
The six-part zombie thriller debuts at 9 p.m. today on AMC. I can’t find an official parental rating yet, but I’m going to call it at least TV-14. Allowing younger viewers to watch might bring child services down on your head.
And not every adult is going to be able to stomach the exceedingly graphic violence that includes flesh-eating zombies and zombie killers killing zombies in messy, messy ways.
If you are not faint of heart and entrails don’t bother you, The Walking Dead is an intriguing saga with a flawed band of survivors struggling to preserve their humanity.
Zombies seem to be all the rage these days. I read somewhere that zombies are the new vampires. And as with vampires, they have different qualities.
The zombies of The Walking Dead fall somewhere between the shuffling Night of the Living Dead (1968) variety and the animated dancing zombies from Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
These zombies still shuffle, but can actually run pretty fast when motivated by the smell of living flesh. Fences,however, seem to stymie them for a long time.
And, yes, you still have to bash them in the brains or blow their heads off with your Colt Python .357 to kill them really, really dead. If not, they’ll drag themselves along even if half their body is missing.
Here’s the premise.
Small-town Georgia Deputy Sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) is seriously wounded on the job and lapses into a coma. He wakes up a month later and the hospital is a shambles and empty.
He’s utterly alone. Well, not utterly.
Grimes slowly realizes that while he was out, a zombie apocalypse has taken place. Although there are survivors, there are lots of walking dead out there waiting to eat him. It’s white-knuckle tension for the entire 90-minute opening episode as Grimes learns about his new world.
Walking Dead is a survivalist story set against thebackdrop of discovering what it means to be human. However, the incessant pressure of fending off grisly death on a daily basis takes a psychological toll. Many survivors find themselves sinking to a new level of cruelty.
As Grimes struggles to keep his family safe, he learns that the all-encompassing fear of the survivors can be more deadly than the “walkers” roaming the earth.
The rest of the ensemble includes Jon Bernthal asGrimes’ best friend Shane Walsh; Sarah Wayne Callies as Grimes’ wife, Lori; and Laurie Holden, Jeffrey DeMunn, Steven Yeun and Emma Bell as survivors in a small camp outside Atlanta.
The series is based on the 2003 comic book series of the same name by Robert Kirkman. Not being a zombie aficionado, I didn’t realize Kirkman was huge and a global cult icon.
Dusty Higgins, one of the paper’s staff artists, is acard-carrying zombie expert intimately familiar with Kirkman’s work. I asked him to review the first two episodes and compare them to the comics to see if they translate to the small screen.
Higgins notes that the series seems to follow the comics on major themes.
“I don’t think any of the changes so far will disappoint fans of the comic,” he said. “I felt the show was surprisingly faithful to the original work considering TV adaptationsI’ve seen in the past.
“Based on what I’ve seen, if the plot does start to drift in another direction, I’d still be just as intrigued in the story as I am with the comic. Of course, I’m fascinated by zombie apocalypse survival stories, so they didn’t need too much to get me hooked.”
The series was filmed in Atlanta and AMC spent some serious money on the effects and makeup. It shows.
After all, AMC is the cable home of top-drawer dramas Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Rubicon. An AMC zombie series is going to be far above average.
Another reason for quality is that the series was written, directed and produced by three-time Oscar nominee Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile). Darabont looks at the series as far more than an excuse to splatter blood and guts.
“As a concept, you can take it as a metaphor for any disaster,” Darabont told AMC. “I’ve always been most fascinated by the idea of stripping away societal structures. What happens when the rules are gone?”
Find out at 9 p.m. today. Better watch with the lights on.
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Style, Pages 58 on 10/31/2010