TELEVISION: The Walking Dead was overrated

I’m an unashamed geek and make no bones about it. I love geek stuff. Hell, I took part in co-writing a really great geek book. Proud to have my name attached to all things geek.

But this needs to be said: AMC’s smash-hit television show The Walking Dead, while quite entertaining, was also highly, highly overrated by my geek brothers and sisters.

Sorry, my geek brethren, but it’s true. We were so caught up in the thrill of getting something delightfully geeky that we elevated the show to a lofty status it has not yet earned.

Now I’m not saying the show was bad. Far from it. I thought the casting was phenomenal, the writing was generally pretty good (though certainly not always), the acting was top notch, the sets and visuals were outstanding, and that overall it was a very solid drama. I’ll be watching when season 2 starts.

But jeez, you’d think the show was the second coming by the way some people gushed. It was the next great show, it was the next Lost (which at the time had just wrapped up a six-season run that garnered it a HUGE cult following), it cured polio, it was this, it was that. By many accounts it was one of the best television shows ever made after just the first few episodes.

Get a grip, people! While I look forward to and will watch season two, a little perspective sure would be nice. Episodes like the Robert Kirkman-penned “Vatos” were clunky and forced. The bunker-centric finale might as well have been an abandoned plotline from Lost. Much of the human drama was fairly strong, but many of the characters were still cardboard thin even after six hours of television. The show’s foreshadowing was heavy-handed as hell. And on and on.

I liked it. It was good television. It’s got the potential to be great television. But can we get some perspective and set aside the BEST TV SHOW EVAAAR!! talk, please? Just because we’ve been given something cool and geeky doesn’t mean we have to fawn all over it like it’s the second coming of The Great Space Coaster (which really WAS the best television show ever). People will think we’re acting like …

… well, geeks.

Hmmmmm. Maybe I ought to reconsider my position on this.