‘Daryl Dixon’ goes to France on AMC
Do we watch television for escapism, or just to confirm our internalized dread? Time was, I marveled at the makers of “Lost” for offering viewers a tropical island retreat as a setting for their cosmic head-scratcher. The gang may have been stuck, but it was so nice to be cast away with them in their lush confinement.
“The Walking Dead” turned this concept on its rotting head and asked us to spend time eternally pursued by shuffling, decomposing creatures. Now in its sixth incarnation, “The Walking Dead” and its popularity has long mystified me. Why do so many people love a show that’s so repetitive, never mind repulsive?
“The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon” (9 p.m. Sunday, AMC, BBC America, IFC, Sundance, TV-MA) moves the action to France, where the zombie apocalypse has turned the picturesque port of Marseille into a trashed scene of human desperation.
Dixon (Norman
Reedus) washes ashore tethered to a small boat, not unlike a modern-day Robinson Crusoe. Once in town, he conveniently finds provisions on an abandoned pleasure craft and even more providentially, he finds a small tape recorder that allows an unseen narrator (presumed dead) to fill us in on the siege of Marseille.
The tape recorder also gives Dixon a tool to record his own thoughts. A handy device for viewers, at least, who might otherwise be stuck watching Dixon trudge in silence from one squalid scene to the next.
I have to admit that the scenery gets better once he gets out of town. And the evidence of Roman settlements in southern Provence offers pleasant distractions as well as at least two versions of fallen ruins for us to ponder as Dixon wonders if he is truly the last man on Earth, or at least in Europe.
But soon he pokes in the wrong wreck of a building, wakes up some zombies and has to smash their brains with his improvised spear.
And then I get bored all over again.
The travel series “Ride With Norman Reedus” (10:25 p.m. Sunday, AMC, TV-14) follows. In the sixth
season opener, our busy host is joined by actor Keanu Reeves for a jaunt through the Utah desert.
Developed from a webcast and imported from England, the “Dreaming Whilst Black” (9 p.m. Sunday, Showtime, TV-MA) stars Adjani Salmon as Kwabena, an underemployed would-be filmmaker with his head in the clouds who’s stuck in a dreadful office job.
A friend and fellow film school grad Amy (Deni Moseley) provides him with a hint to the inside track of the entertainment industry, but Kwabena’s rather languid lifestyle keeps him from making it to appointments and grasping the brass ring.
His dreary office setting allows for a series of mildly amusing scenes of fairly clueless white colleagues treating him like their token Black companion and all the misunderstandings and microaggressions
that can entail.
Sunday night football begins in earnest. This remains the most dependable ratings generator on broadcast TV. The New York Giants host the Dallas Cowboys in NFL football (8:15 p.m., NBC) action.
Given the writers’ and actors’ strikes crippling Hollywood production, networks and cable outlets have become economical with their original programming, doling it out frugally between game shows and repeat procedurals.
That said, it’s interesting that AMC and its affiliated channels are airing a new “Walking Dead” series opposite football. Fox is also introducing the 10th season of its popular musical distraction “The Masked Singer” (8 p.m., Sunday, TV-PG) against the big game.