I've long thought so many of TWD's problems were born out of the creators' apparent contempt for the source material. They've aggressively removed as many of the horror/edge-of-survival elements as they're able, and seem to resent the whole zombie apocalypse thing, as if it's just some inconvenient angle they're forced to sometimes include, rather than the basic premise of the entire project. Remove these elements in this way, and you're literally removing the logic from everything we see, rendering it meaningless sound and fury, yet that's exactly what they've done.
The series is being treated, by those making it, like just another run-of-the-mill tv drama, a daytime soap, and it absolutely wallows in the cliche's of that species of program. Most of the "drama" this season revolves around plotlines that could not only be told on just about any other generic drama, but, in fact, have been told on such shows. And told. And told. And told. The same scenes, usually with exactly the same dialogue. We know them by heart, because we've seen them so often.
And then, TWD itself repeats and repeats and repeats these scenes. Even if one sets aside every other breed of "filler," TWD would still be impossible to defend against the charge that its filler-packed, simply because those same awful scenes so monotonously repeat. Most of TWD, now, is made up of badly-written melodrama, with every emotion and reaction turned up to 11--no subtlety, no complexity, and certainly no maturity.
The terminal lack of any real tension this season is a consequence of that fundamentally wrongheaded decision to strip the series of nearly every horror/survivalist element. Everyone just walks around as if nothing has gone wrong at all. Glenn and Maggie take a trip to the drugstore, and its as if we're in a deserted version of Mayberry, and it's shot like an idyllic horseback ride to town in the sunshine, Glenn and his favorite gal running errands for Aunt Bea. Tie the horses up outside, even though zombies eat horses, the good town druggist has been kind enough to leave the door unlocked, everyone else has been kind enough not to loot the place, go pick up what you need, and even take a break for some sweet afternoon delight, without a care in the world.
That's how everything has been this season--no sense of any real threat, very little sense that much of anything has even changed that much. Part of the effect of this is that the constant cliche' scene of Rick and Lori bemoaning what an awful world it is now, and questioning if it's right to even have children in it--offered perhaps four or five times after Carl was shot, then offered up yet again this week--becomes utterly disconcerting to any viewer with a functioning brain. The world we've been seeing all season is NOT this horrible place, and it doesn't even remotely justify all of these over-the-top histrionics.
Earlier, in a different thread, I was writing about Dale getting into everyone's business. It has made him some enemies among the viewers. In the comics, Dale is a careful observer who does this because he's trying to head off potential problems before they become problems which could endanger the groups' survival. TV Dale is a more-or-less faithful translation of comic Dale, but with one crucial difference--the series' creators removed his rationale for behaving in this manner by severing the horror/survival elements. Without those, the character loses his logic, and TV Dale is now starting to come across, to some viewers, as just a nosy old dick.
The creators have been so aggressive in removing the horror/survival elements that, for the most part, we get no sense that this world has put these characters through anything particularly bad, not even through little hints that wouldn't cost anything to include. They don't look tired or traumatized. We don't get them offering up so much as a paranoid glance at an odd sound, see them speaking in controlled tones, or anything like that. All it would have taken to add a sense of menace to that initial trip to the drugstore is to add a shot of something watching them from inside one of the buildings they pass--wouldn't even have to be clear it was a zombie. We don't get anything like this. When it comes to shooting the show, we don't even get any menacing angles, unsettling camera movements, or sinister lighting. Nothing. The cinematography is flat, dull, and totally uninspired--shows no ambition at all.
The creators were stripping the horror elements from the (much better) first season as it went along, but the problem has positively exploded this season, yet another example of both horrendous writing, and of how said horrendous writing is destroying the series.
