I feel about this Kurt Schlichter piece the way I felt circa spring 2008 when someone would tell me McCain was a terrible nominee. I know it’s true, yet for the sake of The Cause, I feel impelled to push back. We needed to beat Obama. We need more zombie shows on TV.

Can we speak ill of TWD without jeopardizing The Cause?

Maybe they could solve the training “problem” by actually training the civilians, but that never seemed to occur to the self-appointed leaders. In fact, the two cops don’t seem interested in preparing the civilians at all. Instead, they spend most of their time talking about their feelings. It’s agonizing…

The ‘TWD‘ producers like to talk about how their show is about the people, not the zombies. Why that’s supposed to be a good thing is unclear. Regardless, part of the payoff should be watching people we like and root for, not ones who are so lame that the entire series seems to consist of them doing stupid things in the first five minutes and then trying to unscrew them for the next hour…

So then they pile out of their vehicles and proceed to talk. And talk. They talk a lot in ‘TWD.’ Mostly about feelings. Hell, the only good thing about a zombie apocalypse would be that it would wring out this society’s insipid embrace of constant discussions of people’s stupid feelings…

The distracting part of ‘TWD’ is not that the characters do dumb things. People do dumb things. But that’s all they do – dumb things. It’s tiresome. It feels like it’s like a whole TV series that consists of nothing but the kind of dumb where the slasher victim’s hot best friend gets out of the shower in a towel to investigate a strange noise. Except there’s no hot girl in a towel, only these dumb dummies.

After watching last week’s episode, I’m thinking they could probably get rid of the guns and just bore the zombies into killing themselves. Initially I thought TWD would be true heir to the Romero legacy; now I think it’s the true heir to “All My Children.” If I wanted five parts soap opera to one part ghoulishness, I’d wait for the movie adaptation of this. The problem, I think, is that they’re trying to springboard off the Romero-esque idea that zombie films are just character studies splattered with entrails. You stick a bunch of people in the pressure cooker of a cannibal undead apocalypse and you watch ’em cope. Drama. The thing is, there’s actually little character development in Romero’s classics. The good guys are obviously good and the bad guys obviously bad and 95 percent of what they talk about is how to deal with the zombies. The menace of being surrounded is ever present to keep you on edge. In TWD, you’ve got romantic subplots, parent/child subplots, domestic-violence subplots, and, oh yes, an occasional zombie cameo. They’re actually quite good with suspenseful set pieces — hiding under the cars from the zombie herd last week, draping themselves with zombie remains to hide their scent in an episode last season — but those set pieces seem awfully few and far between. Maybe it has to be that way to sustain a dramatic series instead of a two-hour movie, but if so then … I guess The Cause is lost. Tell me I’m wrong. Please.