There is no other show out on cable T.V. like The Walking Dead, the drama, the action, and the suspense all keep the viewer clung to the end of their seat. Currently The Walking Dead holds the title for most watched show in America because the season 4 mid-season finale got the most views of any T.V. to date.

The show begins with Rick Grimes, a Atlanta cop who is thrown into a coma after being shot in the chest. Rick wakes up in the middle of the apocalypse and awakes to find the world he once knew gone, the new world is filled with zombies (known on the show as walkers). When bit or scratched by any of these walkers, the victim is slowly and surely killed through a high fever. After that they re-awaken as a walker some hours later. The only way to stop this transformation is a bullet to the head or some other way of destroying their brain.

A major aspect of The Walking Dead is the fact that no one is safe on the show it seems. As the show goes on we lose character after character that we have come to know and love. An example of this is when Lori dies. Lori is the wife of Rick Grimes and we knew her for 3 seasons and since the very first episode, but writer Robert Kirkman believes in a no one is safe mentality that keeps the viewers on their toes at all times.

The Walking Dead isn’t just about killing and re-killing, though: it’s about rebooting a new civilization while the shambles of the old one constantly remind the survivors that they are still human. This forces many moral dilemmas because in this new world, there are no rules. The struggle for rick to consistently make the right choices in his group cause him to go insane during season 3. Here, you kill or you die. And if you’re really unlucky you die and then you kill.

Critic Brahm Coler feels that “The show’s ability to expand the development of its characters while they also fight off the living dead has allowed The Walking Dead to explore what might happen when society and humanity collapses – something that a lot of apocalypse movies aren’t able to truly analyze” I concur with this idea, I believe that because the walking dead has the ability to put out consistent content (one hour every Sunday) that they are able to build their characters from the bottom up. However this makes it even that much harder to accept the loss of a friend when The Walking Dead kills off your favorite character.

Coler also believes that “The Walking Dead also incorporates numerous messages about surviving in the world of the living dead that help shape the characters and define the flow of the story – messages like “you can’t come back from the things you’ve done” and “in order to survive you have to be willing to do terrible things.”
One particularly gut wrenching story line in season 2 of The Walking Dead is the fight between Rick and his best friend Shane. This is the cause of Shane (who thought Rick was dead) began to have romantic relations with Rick’s wife Lori. Rick tells Shane that he cannot continue this but Shane refuses to let go of the “Love” that he and Lori felt. Shane takes it even as far as to try and kill Rick but fails and Rick is forced to kill Shane. This just shows how The Walking Dead Pits two previously best friends together because this new world is “Ruthless, [and] it’s a survival of the fittest” according to one character on the show. The Walking Dead turns friends against each other in an action packed drama that entices viewers to come back time after time again.