Critical Essay on The Walking Dead by Frank Darabont

The Walking Dead is a post-apocalyptic television show based on the ongoing series of black-and-white comic books of the same name. One may think that a film about zombie-apocalypse cannot be anything else but low-quality trash, but, surprisingly, The Walking Dead shows that it is not always so.

The reason for it is simple – although the plot is placed in the environment of Earth after a pandemic of an unknown disease turning people into zombies, a plotline, which is becoming increasingly more popular during the last few years, the action of the series is not in any way concentrated on zombies, centering its attention on people living in a ravaged world and fighting for their lives in an extremely hostile environment. The all-consuming danger could have been completely different: nuclear winter, rabid animals, global drought – and the main plot still would have been the same.

Because relationships between ordinary people placed into a situation from where there is no way out, which has absolutely no prospects for future, where the only success one may have is to live a little bit longer, turn out to be much more interesting than the actions of any superheroes fighting the hordes of walking dead with their bare hands, for in this case every viewer, at least subconsciously, tries to think of what he would do in similar circumstances, however incredible they are.

Although it may be hard to…