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‘Fear the Walking Dead’ lurches from bad to good to bad again in Season 4 (TV review)

F

ear the Walking Dead” (AMC) is a strange show. I’m not sure the creators have any idea what to do with it at this point. Season 1 started out as a fresh take on the “Walking Dead” universe with new and interesting characters. My understanding was we were going to get a show about the early days of the breakout and how the world handles it. The first season is, in my opinion, really good. The time period allows the writers to show the change people go through from normal life to post-apocalyptic life. However, it moves so fast that they basically go through the breakout in three or four episodes.

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Negan, the scariest TV villain of all time, has turned ‘The Walking Dead’ into a slog (TV review)

Inevitability doesn’t make for great TV. That’s what fans of “The Walking Dead” are finding out in this seventh season (which will resume Feb. 12). It began with a masterful (if utterly harrowing) episode: Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) viciously kills Glenn and Abraham. It was a carefully executed – no pun intended – episode that has informed every millisecond of Negan’s screen time since then, especially when he has his barb-wire-laced baseball bat in hand: We wonder if he will cut loose again.

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The golden age of TV prequels: ‘Bates Motel,’ ‘Gotham’ and ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ (Commentary)

At first blush, prequels should be a boring form of storytelling, because we already know the end point. Of course, there are many examples that prove out-of-sequence storytelling can work – the “Star Wars” prequels and “Smallville” have plenty of fans, for example. But three current series – A&E’s “Bates Motel,” Fox’s “Gotham” and AMC’s “Fear the Walking Dead” — have turned the prequel into an art form, garnering extra drama from the fact that the audience knows where the story is going.

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‘The Walking Dead’ goes back to the beginning of civilization (TV commentary)

In my past posts about “The Walking Dead,” I’ve analyzed how some communities stand as metaphors for forms of government – Woodbury as a fascist state, Terminus as a communist state, the Hospital as an autocratic state, and so forth. I may have jumped the gun, though, because now I think the show serves as an examination of how any modern civilized, organized society (as we know it) forms from the roots up. If modern civilization in 2016 can be boiled down to humanity’s ongoing struggle to find a balance between killing for the sake of security versus not killing because all life has value, “The Walking Dead” is a beautiful, stripped-down metaphor for this struggle.

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John’s top 10 TV shows of 2015

These were my 10 favorite TV shows of 2015:

1. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (Season 1, The CW) – In blending musical numbers, broad comedy and genuine character drama about a troubled 20-something, Rachel Bloom’s brainchild is the most ambitious show of the year. By doing all three of those things well (particularly the musical numbers, which are consistently clever and catchy in the way they explore Rebecca’s and other characters’ neuroses), it’s also the best show of the year. I’ll be following whatever Bloom does next, but I hope this series defies the low ratings and sticks around awhile, at least long enough for an official soundtrack release. (Here are my 10 favorite songs so far.)

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‘The Walking Dead’ teaches us about the value of life (TV commentary)

Sunday’s episode of “The Walking Dead” featured cinematographically beautiful scenes of Morgan and his mentor, Eastman, practicing the martial art of aikido, along with powerfully acted moments of Morgan begging Eastman to kill him. But the most memorable part of the episode is Eastman’s monologues, which — taken together — tell the story of how he learned to value all life.

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‘Fear the Walking Dead,’ ‘Strain’ villains want power for power’s sake (TV review)

A couple seasons ago on “The Walking Dead,” Rick and the gang agree to march toward Washington, D.C., on Eugene’s promise that there was a governmental structure in place working against the zombie plague. While the characters never spoke in-depth about the question of whether the government – which demonstrably failed to stop the zombie plague — should be trusted, I felt strongly that once the gang got to D.C., they would not find a safe government-run utopia.

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First episode impressions: ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ (TV review)

For five seasons, “The Walking Dead” has revealed the flaws of societal structure through a world struggling to rebuild that structure. But we never saw the actual process of the stripping away of society. In the pilot episode, Rick wakes up from his coma post-apocalypse, and other characters haven’t talked about the initial outbreak much, nor have we seen many flashbacks. “Fear the Walking Dead” (9 p.m. Eastern Sundays on AMC) is here to rectify that.

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