The Walking Dead - "Guts"

It was only inevitable that there would be a drop-off in quality between the first episode of The Walking Dead and the second. Frank Darabont doesn't just direct his own script on a basic cable show every day. His presence aside, the pilot was a stripped-down, spartan, effective example of storytelling. Zombie hordes aside, Rick Grimes was the only character onscreen for roughly half of the episode, and he spent most of the other half with only two other characters (one of whom was played by Lennie James, and you can't go wrong with Lennie James). Grimes doesn't have the same magnetism that Tony Soprano or Don Draper did in their premieres, but he's a capable dramatic center, and two-or-three person scenes are generally strong ones.

"Guts" more or less doubles the number of Walking Dead characters, but to little effect. Plucky young Glenn is the only one who shows immediate potential; most of the others are still undeveloped, with two exceptions. There's some blonde woman I don't care much about, and then there's Merle Dixon. It's no stretch of the imagination that a survivor of a zombie apocalypse has lost his cool, but Merle is a raving lunatic in addition to being racist, sexist, and a generally terrible human being overall. It's not that I have a problem with the introduction of an instigator, since they're reliable and somewhat necessary archetypes for zombie movies. But Merle's clashes with T-Dog (himself an uninspiring character) are depressingly cliche. Black/white tensions have been a staple of zombie films since the first Living Dead film and they're becoming old hat. Why not have Merle hate Mexicans? Or have a gay character for him to play off of? I'm not asking the show to reinvent the wheel, just to take a familiar trope in a new direction.

Things improved once Rick and Glenn enacted their bonkers escape plan, which provided an exciting finish to the episode. The less said the better about Rick's wife and the rest of the crew at the Survivalist Trailer Park. That's partially my bias against Dr. Sara Tancredi but even then the scenes are just treading plot water for when the two bands of survivors reunite.

I still have high hopes for the show, of course, and most of these new characters will either be thoughtfully fleshed out or become zombie bait. But the mere presence of Merle is a very bad omen. That kind of shit wouldn't fly on Mad Men. This is AMC, I expect more.