So, watched Walking Dead last night. I thought it was a reasonably strong episode as The Walking Dead goes, less so because lots of exciting things happened and moreso because the director was flexing their chops and working in a lot of artistic flourish, which helped establish a deeply melancholy atmosphere.
It is that latter point that set me to wondering. I remember after "The Rains of Castamere" aired for Game of Thrones, there was a flurry of angry viewers announcing they were done with the program, that it had become too dour and hopeless for them to endure. When "Ozymandias" aired for Breaking Bad I was momentarily tempted to stop watching the show TWO EPISODES FROM COMPLETION because I just couldn't take it any more. We are most of us familiar with Darkness Induced Audience Apathy as a concept, being the TV Tropes fiends that we are.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarknessInducedAudienceApathy
This half season of Walking Dead is shaping up to be...well...extremely bleak, even for a setting renowned for its bleakness. Sasha ends the episode looking emotionally destroyed, and she was already on a freight train to nihilism after Bob's unfortunate death. Maggie has recently lost the last living member of her family and looked past her breaking point. Something seems to have broken deep inside Glenn, and he's on the same path to moral ambiguity that claimed Rick and Shane. Michonne looks fucking done with everything. Noah has a platter full of fresh tragedies to cope with. It goes on and on.
Artistically, this presents the show an opportunity to really dig into The Walking Dead's juiciest thematic potential, which is the toll such a cruel world takes on the survivors left to its mercy, and what kind of people they are forced to become. That's the good. The bad is that it also presents the opportunity for an unrelentingly bleak and emotionally punitive half-season. At which point you begin to wonder just what kind of appetite the audience is going to have for it.
Post-apocalyptic material is always prone to being very dark/hopeless even at the best of times, but to my knowledge has never really gotten the long-form treatment in a television show before. Most people can endure, say, two hours of The Road, or Children of Men, even if it leaves them a bit bummed out. What about 8 hours of that? Or 10? What's the end-game for The Walking Dead? How far down this road can the show go before it starts to hemorrhage viewers? By the same token, how do you insert hopefulness/happiness or comic relief into the show as a necessary palliative without destroying your tone or undermining the show's universe?
It is that latter point that set me to wondering. I remember after "The Rains of Castamere" aired for Game of Thrones, there was a flurry of angry viewers announcing they were done with the program, that it had become too dour and hopeless for them to endure. When "Ozymandias" aired for Breaking Bad I was momentarily tempted to stop watching the show TWO EPISODES FROM COMPLETION because I just couldn't take it any more. We are most of us familiar with Darkness Induced Audience Apathy as a concept, being the TV Tropes fiends that we are.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarknessInducedAudienceApathy
This half season of Walking Dead is shaping up to be...well...extremely bleak, even for a setting renowned for its bleakness. Sasha ends the episode looking emotionally destroyed, and she was already on a freight train to nihilism after Bob's unfortunate death. Maggie has recently lost the last living member of her family and looked past her breaking point. Something seems to have broken deep inside Glenn, and he's on the same path to moral ambiguity that claimed Rick and Shane. Michonne looks fucking done with everything. Noah has a platter full of fresh tragedies to cope with. It goes on and on.
Artistically, this presents the show an opportunity to really dig into The Walking Dead's juiciest thematic potential, which is the toll such a cruel world takes on the survivors left to its mercy, and what kind of people they are forced to become. That's the good. The bad is that it also presents the opportunity for an unrelentingly bleak and emotionally punitive half-season. At which point you begin to wonder just what kind of appetite the audience is going to have for it.
Post-apocalyptic material is always prone to being very dark/hopeless even at the best of times, but to my knowledge has never really gotten the long-form treatment in a television show before. Most people can endure, say, two hours of The Road, or Children of Men, even if it leaves them a bit bummed out. What about 8 hours of that? Or 10? What's the end-game for The Walking Dead? How far down this road can the show go before it starts to hemorrhage viewers? By the same token, how do you insert hopefulness/happiness or comic relief into the show as a necessary palliative without destroying your tone or undermining the show's universe?
