Learn To Craft Essays On Storytelling, Character, & Genre In The First Season Of The Walking Dead With This Example

The first season of the AMC horror-drama The Walking Dead is a self-contained six-part story that exists within the genre of ‘zombie horror’ – a specific type of survival horror media that typically involves a group of people surviving in the wake of a zombie apocalypse. Where The Walking Dead differs from most other examples of zombie media, however, is in its elevation of the low-art perception of the genre into high drama through tasteful presentation, complex characters, and a higher emphasis on moralistic and thematic conflicts, with the zombies merely acting as the backdrop.
The narrative structure of a given Walking Dead episode helps to create this emphasis on the drama by messing with temporality through strangely incongruous cold opens that do not strictly match the action of the episode, but which thematically tie into the series as a whole. “Days Gone Bye” sees Rick, by himself, dispatching a zombie girl in an abandoned convenience store; the rest of the episode shows how he gets to that point. “Tell It to the Frogs” opens with the handcuffed Merle contemplating his fate, independent of the events of the rest of the episode. “TS-19” introduces the audience to Dr. Jenner, a character whom we had not seen elsewhere in the season. These cold opens act not to straightforwardly advance the story, but to fill in narrative and thematic gaps in order to contribute to the show’s bleak, existentialist tone.
The characters are also meant to both draw in zombie-horror devotees and people looking for a serious character drama, melding the two genres to make The Walking Dead somewhere in between. There are characters who are explicitly shown to be zombie-killing action heroes, including Rick, Shane, Andrea, T-Dog and Daryl – these characters are at the forefront of the show’s many action beats. However, some of the weaker characters, like Dale, Lori, Carl and Carol, are used to advance poignant character drama through artfully-crafted screenwriting and discussion of the larger themes of the story (e.g. the value of life after death, the need to survive, finding new purpose in difficult circumstances). The character of Daryl Dixon is a fan-favorite who appeals to both – while his soft-spoken, masculine nature and immense fighting skill make him innately appealing to the audiences who simply wish to cathartically watch zombies get killed, his despair and anger over his lost brother also lends his character a fascinating edge, as he learns to trust the group (and Rick’s leadership) over the course of these episodes. In many ways, he fulfills the ‘redneck biker/hunter’ archetype, but his sense of honor and loyalty elevates him beyond that perception into a compelling character.
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