The Walking Dead Review

For its first few seasons The Walking Dead is genuinely frightening television, and the critical record shows it: a pilot that plays like a small horror film, a prison siege, a governor worth fearing, and practical effects doing work no digital budget would buy. The cast is better than the material needs. Andrew Lincoln carries the moral weight, Melissa McBride turns a background character into the best thing in the show, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan arrives late with real menace.

Then the problems set in and never leave. The middle seasons pad, the group finds a settlement, loses it and finds another, characters are killed for shock and occasionally walked back, and the dialogue turns into speeches about what it means to survive. Reviewers who called the early years some of the best horror on television were writing off the later ones entirely, and the audience left in numbers rarely seen. What survives is the ambition, a horror series that ran eleven seasons on a basic cable network and made zombies mainstream again. The first half is worth the trouble.