The Walking Dead: Episodic Analysis

The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010-) is an award winning post-apocalyptic television show broadcasted on AMC. (Seibert, 2016) The show is unique due to its production style as while it is a horror television drama, it is produced to have the look and feel of a full-length feature movie (Stelter, 2014). The first season was premiered in 2010 and has since grown in popularity over the past 6 years, reaching its sixth season recently in 2016. The show is full of interesting aspects that has helped it to gain an extremely popular fan base. I am going to be looking at all of the seasons and analyzing the genre, narrative and performance style demonstrated within the narrative structure.
The horror drama begins with an episodic format, where each episode …show more content…
Considering that the show is set in a post-apocalyptic world, this is already introduced and the audience love the excitement about not knowing whether someone or something is soon to meet their terrible fate within each episode. Horror has often been considered as a genre that is more successful and popular in film rather than on television however, the recent rise of viewers who tune in to watch American Horror Story, True Blood and Supernatural; which are all considered to be horror based fiction like The Walking Dead. They each all engage the typical generic conventions of horror which is what makes them so popular. It is made obvious that the setting and characters are American as the show itself is set in Atlanta, Georgia however it still deals with themes that are universal. Using the Lacanian theory, I’m going to contract the ways in which The Walking Dead merges the western genre with the zombie genre. By combining these two genres together which is very evident due to the accents of main characters, it makes the show more thought-provoking as it combines two American narratives: the western and the zombie apocalypse. (Turl, 2015) “Dead conflates the western with the zombie genre. This combination of genres is all the more thought-provoking as the western genre traditionally stages the Grand Narrative of patriarchal power from within the historical context of colonialist imperialism, whereas the zombie genre is associated with the destabilization of such forms of power.” (DAN, 2012) On a whole, The Walking Dead is a text for a niche audience. This audience is also likely to include horror genre enthusiasts and the fans that followed the original comic book

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