Walking Dead: Great Comic, Lame Show

Me in 2009, in reference to a Wired article about the upcoming Walking Dead series on AMC :

I am SO STOKED for this. This is great news. The Walking Dead is the only comic I have read for the past few years, and speaking as someone who was an active comic reader until about 6 years ago, it is one of the finest examples of the art.

Wired's blurb for this link is misleading in how it characterizes TWD as "The Simpsons with zombies," though. What creator Robert Kirkman means is that unlike zombie movies that just end at some point, the story of TWD just keeps going, compounding, escalating. The comic is now up to, I believe, issue 63, so the story has matured quite a bit. The most intriguing part of the story is just the human drama and interaction, watching how the characters react to an increasingly stressful environment and try to find some kind of normalcy in it.
It's not a book for the faint of heart, for sure. It's definitely a mature readers title (language, violence, lotsa deadness). But if you suspended disbelief for a few moments and stopped to consider -- if there really were a huge zombie outbreak that killed almost everybody, what would life really be like for those trying to stay alive? -- that's The Walking Dead.

Me now: I haven't watched that show since before they introduced Negan some time in 2016 (season 6). I didn't expect it to be anywhere near as good as the comic, but I didn't expect such lazy and yawn-inducing writing and character development either, not to mention the completely baffling tactical decisions the group makes over and over.

I may end up watching some of the new spinoff series, Fear of the Walking Dead, just because they will be filming in my old stomping ground of central Virginia.

Interesting side note I just discovered: Michael Rooker, who played Daryl's brother Merle in the first season is the poop-pretzel-eating mall manager from Mallrats, as well as most recently playing the blue-hued Yondu in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies.