10 Years Later, We Still Need ‘The Walking Dead’

It was pretty early in the pandemic, while everyone else was prepping a sourdough starter or hosting Zoom cocktail parties that I realized my comfort food wasn’t yeasty concoctions or playing games in a tiny box on screen: it was watching The Walking Dead.

Sort of a weird thing to admit, I’m sure, what with the frequently violent and often grim franchise seemingly being our worst nightmare of what a pandemic can be. Granted, nobody is shambling around biting each other outside our windows, but I did start to wonder why this show, of all shows, was the one I could finally unclench while watching.

It didn’t take too long to figure out: beyond the shocking deaths, creative gore, and frequent scares, The Walking Dead, more than anything else, has always been about how we hold together in the face of unimaginable adversity. That’s held true from the comics created by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard; to all ten seasons of The Walking Dead; to both spinoffs, Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: World Beyond. The oft-cited line from Kirkman and crew has been that the real threat in the series has always been the humans, not the zombies; but that ignores humans being our salvation, too.

I can’t say for certain that’s what initially drew people to the show when it first aired on AMC on October 31, 2010. Written and directed by Frank Darabont, “Days Gone Bye” follows former sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) as he wakes up from a nearly month long coma to discover the world has fallen, taken over by the shambling undead. He bonds briefly with a man named Morgan (Lennie James) and his son, while elsewhere outside Atlanta his wife Lori (Sarah Wayne-Callies), son Carl (Chandler Riggs) and best friend Shane (Jon Bernthal) have no idea he’s still alive.

The first episode of the series — and arguably, most of the first season — aren’t that much different from your typical zombie movie. People make some dumb choices, there are villains both human and not, and ultimately what’s left of our survivors head to a second location, a place you should never follow a hippie to but is okay when it comes to the zombie apocalypse. The series’ dependence on film made it grainy, but gorgeous, the performances were great (for the most part), and the effects by Greg Nicotero, an acolyte of both Tom Savini and George A. Romero, made everything that much more visceral. Big ratings followed, and along with Game of Thrones airing on HBO a few months later, helped reshape the way television was made.

But it was also clear that something changed between the first season and the second, beyond the fanbase exploding. Full disclosure, at the time I was working freelance for AMC, and among other things handled social media coverage of the San Diego Comic-Con panel, as well as booth signings and photography for the network. The panel was packed, the fans were amped… But the booth signing was another story entirely. I can still remember standing behind the cast taking pictures as the entire con floor was flooded behind them — and Norman Reedus (who plays Daryl Dixon on the series) going rogue and jumping into the crowd to hand out hugs and handshakes. San Diego Comic-Con was already known for its bombastic displays by the summer of 2011, but being in the eye of the Walking Dead storm, it was clear these people were rock stars.

Season 2, arguably (because I am arguing this right now) is where everything changed. Kirkman’s whole mission for The Walking Dead was to make the comics — and therefore the TV series — show what would happen after the zombie movie. That meant by definition the longer the series went on, the more it fulfilled that mission of always moving forward, expanding the world, understanding that just because you’ve escaped the store, the mall, the island, the boat, whatever doesn’t mean the threat is over. There will never be a cure for the zombie plague in Walking Dead, because like how life always finds a way, so do the characters on TWD.

There were also behind the scene changes, as Frank Darabont left as showrunner — not entirely amicably — and was replaced by Glen Mazzara. Though Season 2 introduced fan favorites including Maggie Greene (Lauren Cohan), an arc that found the group stuck on the Greene farm tried some viewers — and critics’ — patience. It didn’t matter, though. The ratings continued to grow, and the fanbase did, too.

Halfway through Season 3, more behind the scenes changes as Mazzara also left the show — not entirely amicably — and was replaced by Scott M. Gimple, who has since worked his way up to Chief Creative Officer of the Walking Dead universe. When the series hit Season 4, it was already dominating every convention the cast hit up, from San Diego to New York, and even spawned its own, dedicated series of conventions called Walker Stalker Con (attracting future Fear the Walking Dead star Zoe Colletti, among others).

But by that point, something had changed. While critics continued to lament the graphic violence and grim outlook of the series, fans were hooking into something entirely different, and that was the sense of community. I visited the set of the series (working for MTV) before the start of Season 5, and was surprised to discover that in the middle of the wilderness, miles from the base camp itself were fans. They were patiently waiting a safe distance away from the security guards, holding banners professing their love and support for Andrew Lincoln, Norman Reedus and the rest. And every time a car passed by, even if it contained — say, for example — a random journalist for MTV News, they would clap and cheer.

This is the core of the fandom for The Walking Dead that has grown over the years; not the gore-hounds, though there are those, too. And not the misogynist, Alpha-male elements some other fandoms may have, and that an outsider might expect from a show that regularly has pieces ripped off their main characters. The fans of The Walking Dead think of themselves as a family, because that’s what they see on screen.

It’s more than that, though, because it’s about the families you form, not the ones you’re born into. Beth’s (Emily Kinney) most iconic moments are bonding with Daryl, not her sister Maggie. Carol’s (Melissa McBride) arcs have always come back to the pain of losing her daughter, or other fostered children; but she’s persevered thanks to the members of the group who are not her blood relatives. Even Rick himself, who would do anything for Carl (Chandler Riggs) or baby Judith finally found himself with the family he formed in Alexandria, not the one he woke up to at the dawn of the zombie apocalypse.

I can’t even begin to encapsulate all of the stories from every fan of The Walking Dead, but I’d imagine a number of them have experienced a familial loss that was healed, in part, through fellow fans of The Walking Dead. Or on a more base level, similar to other fandoms, finally finding the people who like what you like is often enough to form a cohesive bond stronger than any idyllic view of the nuclear family in the suburbs.

That’s certainly part of what has brought me back to The Walking Dead franchise over the years, and has taken on new resonance now. There are innumerable parallels you can draw between TWD and the current situation (a common refrain on Twitter is about how no-one will ever doubt that the guy who would hide his zombie bite, putting others at risk, is a dumb trope after living through this year). But the one that keeps resonating with me is the idea that together, we can persevere. Unlike COVID-19, the zombie plague is tactile. It’s something you can see, something you can kill. As Rick said famously, “we are the walking dead,” everyone on the show is infected and will turn when they die; whether from violence, or old age. But there’s still the hope that you can slowly chip away at the zombie plague and reestablish a new, utopian society.

But more than those big ideas, it’s the sense of cohesiveness, particularly in recent seasons of the series under the steady hand of new showrunner Angela Kang, as well as Fear and World Beyond, that have put them on a steady rotation in my house. There are villains who want to break everyone apart, but like the best fiction they can and will be overcome (even if the next threat is on the horizon). But even the worst of them — for example Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) — can ultimately be changed through the understanding that only together can we make it through this. That warmth, that light may have been absent on the surface in early seasons; but for fans it was always there, and it’s only grown over time.

During a set visit for the 100th episode of The Walking Dead, I joked that the show should eventually become Grey’s Anatomy with zombies, using a rotating cast to keep the show fresh and relevant over time. What it has become instead is Painting with Bob Ross, but with zombies. Every episode you can expect those cute little trees, the same sort of rivers and landscapes, but in a new iteration. Sometimes there’s experimentation, sometimes things get shaken up. But it always comes back to the threat of zombies, and how human connection fights them back. Like Bob Ross, it’s comfort food, and it’s that sense of succor that will keep me returning to The Walking Dead for another decade — and beyond.

Where to watch The Walking Dead