BAD TV SHOWS EAT OUR BRAINS
I’m often asked whether the Walking Dead is worth watching, now that AMC’s endlessly popular post- apocalyptic drama is some six years and seven seasons in. The long answer is that it continues to derive intrigue from a sardonic future vision and remains compelling even if it doesn’t always satisfy. The short answer is no. Eighty-eight episodes loom before the interested viewer – nearly 100 hours of raucous flesheating and prolix moral debate, if you factor in the ninety-minute specials. Those of us still watching don’t endure because it’s a sensible use of our time. We endure because we’re invested. How could I in good conscience recommend anyone else do the same?
Talk to enough people about what they watch and you’ll learn that a lot of shows get good in the fifth season — or in the sixth, or in the seventh, or in the 12th, when the network brought on a new showrunner and updated the cast and shifted the action from x to y. Or whatever. It’s almost as if the show itself matters less to the predictable arc of this improvement than the number of hours one has unhappily dedicated to it.
Maybe we just developed a certain affection for characters whom we’ve spent literally days of our lives getting to know. Maybe after 100 hours in the company of Rick Grimes and his zombiesurviving brigade I can’t evaluate episode 89 as an impartial judge.
Call it a kind of TV Stockholm Syndrome. Like the real thing, it’s totally irrational: dreck shouldn’t appeal to us any more after suffering through it for a half-decade, and yet invariably it seems to. Our defences weaken. Our taste withers away. We grow more and more accustomed to idiosyncrasies both bad and good – until one day the show we mocked and put on only to kill time or watch half-distractedly becomes a favourite.
We eagerly tune in to the eighth season of Dexter, for some goddamn reason, or devour with unjustifiable pleasure yet another instalment of Suits season six. How helpless we are before our televisual captors! How ludicrously impressionable, how easily taken in! Woe is us.
The 89th episode of the Walking Dead airs this Sunday at 9 p. m. Lunatic that I am, I can hardly wait to dig in.