I Approve

AMC premiered The Walking Dead tonight after a long wait and a lot of talk. As a big fan of the comic, I think it's safe to say that most of us readers were extremely excited to see how it turns out. However, I was also very concerned. Once you start reading the comics, you quickly see that it's not a typical zombie story. This story is about the people still alive. About how to deal with the world you're in now that everything you had has been taken. As the back of the trades says "In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally start living". My fear was that a television show would glamorize the look of the zombies more then anything.
And that fear was proven wrong.
This show was great. As a fan of the comics, I may be a bit biased but I don't care. It was fantastic. They nailed the feeling of the book even thought they stray from it a bit (they are going to follow the main plots but the journeys to and from will differ). I was quite liking it to start with but there was one scene that solidified it for me.
After waking up from a coma after being shot, Sheriff Rick Grimes stumbles into a world filled with the living dead. The first actual people he comes across are Morgan Jones and his son Duane. In the comic, that's about where it stops. They fill him in on what they can, he gives them some guns and ammunition from the station and they all go their own way. In the show, they bond a little more. Morgan has lost his wife to the "sickness" and she comes back to their house every now-and-then. As they part ways, we follow both as they try to be at their most human. Rick goes back to the park where he had earlier seen the top half of a zombie crawling along. He tracks her down, says "I'm sorry this happened to you" and shots her in the head, tears in his eyes. Morgan takes a gun and rustles the zombies outside, trying to get his wife out so that he can put her out of her misery. Unlike Rick though, he still only sees the face of his wife and can't do it. Switching between these two scenes really nailed it. That the writers know it's about the people desperately wanting to stay human in this world. Nailed and nailed.
If you missed the premiere, you missed out on some great stuff. Get online and watch it. I think AMC.com will have it up at some point soon but watch it somehow, somewhere.
I give this show a big thumbs up. Absolutely, I approve.