When writing The Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman wanted to create a rich world filled with a diverse and evolving cast, but even good ideas can go bad.
The Walking Dead includes many tributes to zombie media of the past - especially the work of George A. Romero - but it is also famous for dodging cliché and always doing the unexpected. However, there was one cliché that writer Robert Kirkman was committed to avoiding, but which nevertheless came back with a vengeance once the franchise truly made it big.
Kirkman has stated many times that The Walking Dead isn't a comic about zombies - it's about a group of people who are dealing with the collapse of the world as they know it. The series succeeded partly because it wholly embraced this concept, depicting real people defined by flaws and contradictions. However, part of this realism was a surprising large cast, as Rick's group constantly gathered new members while encountering different groups of survivors across the country.
It used to always bug me when I was a kid when I'd watch TV shows, and they would introduce a cool character for an episode, and then they'd say goodbye at the end of the episode, and that was it. A new character joining a series and sticking around always seemed so rare. That's one of the reasons the cast of this series is always expanding and evolving. That seems more natural to me. Little did I know, the thing that annoyed me about those shows was due to budgets and actors' schedules and all kinds of real-world things.
Walking Dead's huge comic cast allowed it to truly flesh out a world transformed by the zombie apocalypse. From the Greene family and their farm, to the beleaguered denizens of the Alexandria Safe-Zone, to the nightmarish Whisperers and beyond, characters exist both as individuals and as members of a larger - often dangerous - body politic. Unfortunately, for Kirkman, once the comic series was picked up for a TV adaptation, the realities of this old pet peeve returned, and he found he was forced to do exactly what he'd set out to avoid in the original story. Kirkman explains:
....it was SO ironic when Lennie James turned out to be so popular and in-demand that it took FOREVER to finally be able to get him back in The Walking Dead TV show. We wanted to make him a regular in season 2. The best we could do is a guest spot in season 3, and he didn't become a regular until season 4 or 5. My old childhood pet peeve, coming back to haunt me.
Walking Dead's Many Perspectives Are Key to its Success
Even with the limitations of budget and actor availability, AMC’s The Walking Dead was still regarded as a monument to the ensemble cast, featuring an absolutely massive repertory of hundreds of actors. Kirkman’s instinct that more characters could lend more perspectives was a key part of the overall tone of the comic series, ensuring that no single viewpoint is ever left unquestioned. This is true right to the end, with even an adult Carl in a post-zombie future encountering those who disagree with his weathered pessimism. The TV show achieved some of the same charm, but as Kirkman describes, it also met with realities that aren't present in the medium of comics.
){kind=link}
0 Comments