'The Walking Dead': too much, too far?
- By Gail Pennington St. Louis Post-Dispatch
- 5 hrs ago
- (5)
There are no spoilers in this blog post, but beware of possible comments if you haven't watched yet. "A character drama is now torture porn," one (former)
another said.
"So awful to witness, it made me question why I watch,"
one critic tweeted. Another added the hashtag #toomuch to a comment that saying he was glad to have missed the Season 7 premiere, in which two characters died gruesomely, not at the hands of "walkers" but via the barbed wire baseball bat of super-villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). fan declared on Twitter after Sunday night's bloody season premiere.
All this confirmed that my decision to abandon a show I once loved was the correct one. My "I quit" moment came last season, after a lot of bait and switch, incoherent plotting and inconsistent character behavior. The extreme violence was just one more reason.
But "The Walking Dead" has always been violent, you say? Yes, but a lot of us who wouldn't normally like a show about zombies were drawn in by the characters, struggling not just to survive but to live with humanity in a time of little hope. Now, the violence (and again, yes, I know it is following the comic books) is portrayed with so much relish, so gratuitously, that it is simply repellent. The real world is scary and stressful enough these days. Self-torture via a TV show isn't for me. If you disagree, and you're still watching, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
STLTODAY
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