“Mad Men” Recap: 503, “Tea Leaves” on StaticBlog
George Lang’s extensive recap of Sunday’s “Mad Men” episode is up on StaticBlog. Block out some time — it takes almost as long to read as it does to watch the episode. And in case you missed his 8000-word recap of last week’s two-hour season premiere, go here to read just how obsessive one fan can be.
AMC’s “The Walking Dead” tackles zombies with brains, guts and plenty of bite
Frank Darabont’s “The Walking Dead” has brains, guts and plenty of bite. The series, debuting at 9 p.m. Sunday on AMC, has the potential to redefine onscreen zombie sagas by fleshing out its living characters and, rather than simply engaging viewers in the standard video-game mechanics of an undead story (can you get from A to B without getting chomped? How many stumbling corpses can you kill along the way?) “The Walking Dead” asks serious questions about morality and the lengths people might take to survive the zombie apocalypse.
Based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book series and executive produced by the author, “The Walking Dead” centers on Deputy Sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln of “Love, Actually”), who experiences a brutal twist on the Rip Van Winkle story: a shootout with fugitives lands him in the hospital, comatose. When he wakes up after an untold number of weeks, his IV drip is dry, the EKG is silent and nobody will respond to his requests for help. But as he stumbles through the hospital, clearly a facility ravaged by some terrible fate, the tell-tale signs of an encroaching horror become all too obvious to Rick: bodies stripped of flesh down to the bones, warnings written in human blood on double doors bulging from the insistent pushing of groaning, determined forces on the other side.
The outside world is in the early stages of what Alan Weisman described in “The World Without Us”: nature is taking everything back as the weeds grow higher and the silence deafens. When Rick encounters other survivors such as Morgan (Lennie James) and his young son Duane, he learns that the corpses he saw as he left the hospital are only the ones that were beaten back, dispatched to final, permanent death. His new reality is reduced to simply staying alive while the the “walkers” swarm the streets looking for live flesh. Rick now must try to find his wife Lori and his son Carl, who he’s convinced are still alive, and his plan is to go directly to Atlanta, where there is allegedly a government-protected area where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is looking for a way to cure the plague.
Series creator Darabont is known best for directing “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile,” two Stephen King stories based largely in some semblance of reality, but his most recent film was an adaptation of King’s “The Mist,” a raging B-movie style monster piece. Working closely from Kirkman’s story, Darabont, who directed the pilot, has fashioned a zombie-infested world in which the survivors must be ingenious enough to fight off the decaying hordes — zombies might not be smart, but they are tenacious. In the second episode, Rick and several other survivors including Glenn (Steven Yuen) and Andrea (Laurie Holden, “The Mist,” “The X-Files”) come up with a method of disguising themselves that might be the most disgusting concept ever presented in zombie fiction.
This brings up the question of the hour: does Darabont pull any television-enforced punches when depicting zombie splatter? The answer is an emphatic no: this is possibly the most gory, visceral series on television. You can put “The Walking Dead” up against George A. Romero’s series beginning with “Night of the Living Dead” onward, Zack Snyder’s remake of “Dawn of the Dead,” Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” or last year’s “Zombieland” and it’s clear that Darabont’s blood is not watered down. This is tough stuff: treat “The Walking Dead” like the old rule about swimming — wait a decent amount of time after eating.
But there is far more to “The Walking Dead” than just spilling bowels and exposed jaw bones. Survivors such as Morgan must deal with something rarely depicted with any nuance or emotion in zombie fiction: the emotional tug of seeing loved ones wandering the streets as their bodies fall apart. Something else is at play early on: the possibility that the undead have some memory of what they once were, who they loved, and where they belonged.
Lincoln plays Rick Grimes as a reluctant leader, much like Jack Sheppard in “Lost,” and he’s great in the role. While he was a man of competence and honor in the days before the zombies, Rick is now relying on a reservoir of untapped strength and character, and Lincoln is clearly up to that task. The rest of the cast is equally strong, including Jon Bernthal as Shane Walsh, Rick’s old partner in the sheriff’s office. “The Walking Dead” is a wildly different animal than AMC’s flagship series “Mad Men,” but it’s clear that Darabont, Kirkman and executive producer Gale Anne Hurd are putting just as much care into their project, and have been given a free reign by AMC to do zombies right. Wipe out all plans for Sunday or devote DVR space for the next 13 weeks: “The Walking Dead” is dead on arrival, and that’s a great thing.
– George Lang
