What happens when you consume the same piece of pop culture so many times, you peel back the layers of rotted flesh to discover hidden depths that, on first glance, you missed?
This piece by our dear Audre Myers is a beautiful illustration of that phenomenon. That said, the series she’s reviewing—yes, as entire, decade-plus-long series—is arguably something more than mere pop culture. It may represent a work of television art.
The late aughts and early teens of this century saw a golden age of television as an art form. Outside the confines of a film’s ninety-or-so-minute runtime, television series have the luxury of developing characters across hundreds of hours of screen time and multiple seasons. Narratives can explore deeper complexity. Themes can be examined in all their glorious nuance.
I don’t want to give away Audre’s key insight about this show, but I’ll note that I think she is correct. Let me know what you think in the comments.
With that, here is Audre’s series retrospective of The Walking Dead:
The Portly Politico 