Where The Walking Dead went wrong

America's favorite playfully gory horror Western has turned into a dire slog. What happened?

The Walking Dead premieres Oct. 23, 2016.
(Image credit: Gene Page/AMC)

In the first and finest season of The Walking Dead, sheriff's deputy Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) emerges from a coma to find the world he knows transformed into a grotesque zombie hellscape.

It's a familiar trope — Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later perfected it in 2002, with Cillian Murphy's chilling wander through abandoned London — but nonetheless a compelling one, tossing viewer and protagonist alike headlong into cataclysm. By the end of the series premiere, "Days Gone Bye," written and directed by creator Frank Darabont, the sense of the smallness of man against the sheer scope of a zombie disaster created The Walking Dead's most indelible image. Guns slung over his shoulder, cowboy hat high on his head, Rick rides on horseback into Atlanta, the highway's outbound lanes clogged with abandoned cars frozen in flight.

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Matt Brennan

Matt Brennan is a film and television critic whose writing has appeared in LA Weekly, Indiewire, Slant Magazine, The Week, Deadspin, Flavorwire, and Slate, among other publications. He lives in New Orleans and tweets about what he's watching @thefilmgoer.