Lets Talk About The Walking Dead

For the last 3 months The Walking Dead books are all that I have been reading. I have read every book available, from 1 to 14, I've even started to re-read the series. It's that good. So when I found out that the books was going to be turned into a AMC tv series I was nothing but excited. Sadly though, this show sucks. Hard. I'm not just saying that to disagree with its popularity, I will now talk about what went wrong with this starting in this blog about episode 1, Days Gone Bye.

The show opens with Rick and Shane talking in a police car about problems with there wife. This was the first thing that bothered me about the show. When I read I usually don't read with an accent so I guess I just didn't pick up that both of these characters have incredibly thick southern accents. I guess I can get around that, seeing as they are living in the south, but still I honestly don't care about it and the only reason that this scene is in the show is to show that Rick and Lori are having marital troubles and I guess this is to help give more reason to Lori hooking up with Shane, but the scene has some pretty pore dialog and goes on way too long.

Next thing that happens is Shane and Rick get a called to a car chase out on the highway. This is were things changed quite drastically. Everyone has at least one friend who exaggerates storeys, this show exaggerates more or less everything in the books. In the books there is no car chase, its two rednecks shooting at cops from there beater truck, one ends up shooting Rick. That would not be enough though, so they changed the beater truck to a sports car that's flying down the road, hits a spike strip does about 3 flips in the air, blows up, than a gun fight between the cops and the people driving the car. Rick gets shot twice in slow motion in the most dramatic pose you could imagine. Rick than awakes weeks later in the hospital about a week after the zombie apocalypse. I must say, for a man waking up out of a coma in a completely dead world, Rick is VERY relaxed by the whole thing. At best I would say he's mildly surprised by the whole thing.

Just saw a bloody walking dead girl. Terrified. Seriously.

Lets ignore this dudes acting and pretend es actually doing really awesome. Maybe his character is just a hardcore bad ass? So he stumbles through the hospital and eventually finds a way outside. Here is another pretty major change from the book. In the book the whole town is empty, no dead bodys no walking dead people, just Rick. Know what would be really scare though? If when Rick walks out of the hospital there was like a mountain of dead bodys! Like they'll be everywhere! And he has to walk past them! That would be scary right? Yeah that could have been an awesome idea, but like almost everything they changed from the books it didn't work out so well.

The issue with this idea is that instead of leaving it at that they kept the scene from the book where Rick sees the dead girl next to the bike and begins to cry. It sorta defeats the sadness of seeing the single dead girl when you had to walk past the holocaustesque body count to get to her.

See what i'm saying here?

Moving on past that part, Rick heads to his old house in search of his family when a kid hits him in the face with a shovel, Rick passes out and wakes up in there house hours later. That does happen in the book but after hitting him in the face with a shovel they treat him a little nicer. In the show he wakes up to the dad saying he will kill him and not think twice about it. Is that really anyway to treat a coma victim that you just hit in the face with a shovel? It's just seemed like a weird personality thing to change.

"I will kill you and don't you even think that I wont"
Once again, See what i'm sayin here?

In the book Rick stays with this family for a maximum of 5 pages, this show really drags Ricks stay with these people out. Also adding in a smaller sub story about how the family's mom is infected and they have to put her down. Maybe i'm just a dick about this sorta stuff but i just don't care. Even after Rick leaves it fallows these peoples mommy issues. Maybe it's to build up Morgan as a character a little more because he does make a return in the books somewhere around book 10 or 11, but at the speed this show is going that episode will be so far away everyone will have forgotten about this guy.

Rick eventually leaves this family and heads to Atlanta to find his family. He just wonders into the city and gets overwhelmed by the swarms of the dead. Finding refuge in a perfectly placed tank it looks like Rick is about to die. When suddenly over a perfectly placed walkie talkie Glenns voice comes through offering help. The episode ends here. Just a question I have, how did Glenn get ahold of the other walkie talkie in the tank? Was he just randomly surfing channels yelling into them hoping Rick would hear it? How did he know that there even was a walkie talkie in the tank for Rick to hear? That just bugged me a bit.

So that is the end of the premiere episode of The Walking Dead. If your reading this hoping that the show gets better in later episodes let me just tell you now, it doesn't.