Finally, a Zombie Television Series: The Walking Dead Adapted On AMC

I think I may have mentioned once or twice, perhaps five times that I think a television series based around a zombie apocalypse would be a fantastic idea. Maybe it was a hundred times. Anyway, it appears that my geek fan boy fantasy has finally become a reality. The hit comic book Walking Dead will be made into a television show with

AMC, which has fast emerged as a top notch channel for dramas like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, plans to air the show in 2010, according to IMDB. Now, I have never read the comic but just what I've picked up from the site and other areas online it follows my thoughts about how to portray a zombie outbreak over a period of time. Instead of just Normal Life / Outbreak / Death / Struggle / Death / Credits the series will follow the complete breakdown of society and the struggles of the characters to gather together and survive the aftermath and how that affects certain people's moral compass.

More interesting is that Frank Darabont is involved. He has a storied career including The Shawshank Redemption as well as some horror roots in Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and The Blob remake.

I haven't been a big fan of AMC in the past, mainly because of the diluted offerings of movies they carry while still maintaining the name American Movie Classics. As an additional pet peeve, I really get miffed that they don't close caption a lot of their content which any father can tell you is essential when you are trying to watch a show and you have little ones are sleeping or napping, nearby. I spend about 85% of my television viewing time reading captions because I have to keep the volume low.

Still, I am voraciously looking forward to seeing them pull this off on the small screen and will have my strained DVR ready to record for Live+7 viewing. I am also glad that the show was picked up by a cable network instead of the Big three or Medium 4, if you choose to include Fox. I'm sure Fox already passed on this show because they didn't have any other available time slots on Fridays to dump it like every other good show. From what I gather from an interview with the author, NBC almost had it and we've seen what happened to another "comic book" style show after its first season. We've also seen what they've done to their schedule. Having this show on television and on a major network would be a slow and painful death as it would have to be aired at ten o'clock which runs into Leno's show. I'm seeing a pattern of death here. Not to mention a show of this nature would be extremely sanitized of all content necessary for a gritty, post apocalyptic show about flesh eating living dead attackers.

So, kudos to cable for being a creative safe haven for great shows. Boo to the big networks for bowing to the sponsors and giving the audience a big old middle finger to bite off and chew. I may have to start reading the comic as research. That will be the official reason for me to be reading a comic book I'll have you know.