Post by Amanda Keeler, Marquette University

The Walking Dead “companion” series Fear the Walking Dead is the latest iteration of offshoot/spinoff storytelling around this narrative universe. Fear the Walking Dead premiered Sunday night on AMC, setting another ratings record for the cable channel by reaching approximately 10.1 million viewers. I’ve written about The Walking Dead previously on Antenna, in a piece that focuses on the complexities of genre and how the show fluctuates over time to blend multiple genres, primarily by mixing western imagery to create a post-apocalyptic return to the frontier. The announcement of the new program Fear the Walking Dead led me to a number of questions related to how the show would work in terms of storytelling, genre, setting, and character. Without the comic book as a reference point, how would its narrative progress and/or differ from the original television show? How would its differing landscape and location, set in Los Angeles, California, rather than the American south, shift its tone and genre? What types of character would populate its world? Would it function as an ensemble cast, or would one or two characters dominate the central narrative?

While the prolific nature of film sequels and blockbuster franchises suggests the relative safety of building new pieces around known narrative worlds, the enormous popularity of The Walking Dead puts a lot of pressure on its new companion piece. Audiences at this point, on the cusp of The Walking Dead’s sixth season premiere slated for 11 October 2015, are accustomed to many of the elements that define the original show. This precursor sets up the new show in some positive and negative ways, depending on which elements of the original show resonate with individual viewers. But unlike The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead will likely not be given multiple seasons to find its audience or to have the luxury of missteps along the way.

Critical reviews thus far have been mixed. Laura Bradley at Slate thinks it should have been a comedy so that the two shows could function as “palate cleansers for each other.” Todd VanDerWerff at Vox writes that “the show is basically Parenthood with zombies.” But, is that a bad thing? What do we want so-called “zombie” shows to look and feel like? Do viewers want this to be the same show but in a different setting, and is that even possible? Will it create the same kind of viewer dissatisfaction that the second season of True Detective experienced this summer when the central story moved from Louisiana to California?

In terms of the show’s location, I wonder if the Los Angeles location might disrupt the deeply traditional gender norms that define the characters across the first three seasons on The Walking Dead. This isn’t clear yet, but remains something to pay attention to in the context of this show’s cast, being that Kim Dickens (as Madison Clark) is the show’s most famous cast member, who may or may not be the “Rick Grimes” (Andrew Lincoln) of this world. As well, my interpretation of The Walking Dead as a western is deeply tied to its location in the south and the pre-apocalyptic professions of its two main characters in seasons one and two. Rick and Shane (Jon Bernthal), who were both law enforcement officers, have the knowledge of and access to the guns and ammunition that are key to their post-apocalyptic survival. In Los Angeles, who or what will have that kind of upper hand?

To address my pre-viewing questions: It is definitely a different show than its precedent — and it is much too soon to tell if that is good or bad. It was an entertaining hour of television that moved slowly, much like the pilot of The Walking Dead. Unlike that pilot episode, “Days Gone Bye,” however, the main character will not wake up after everything in the world has changed. This new show gives us Rick’s coma time, through the Clark-Manawa family, and it will take viewing a few more episodes to find out if this unexplored timeline is worthy of the screen time that Fear the Walking Dead is giving it.

From the perspective of the first episode, the show does one thing quite well. While not terribly visually interesting beyond the shots of a bleak, polluted urban landscape, the pilot episode of Fear the Walking Dead uses sound to tell its story in a fascinating way. As somewhat omniscient viewers who are aware of the events that will soon transpire, we know a lot more than the characters and it builds anticipation towards some unknown tipping point. The show plays with this audience knowledge by cleverly using the cacophony of the city to foreshadow the slow yet inevitable realization that zombies (or walkers) will soon be a threat to these characters’ existence. The characters hear sirens, helicopters, gunshots, but continue through their days with these “normal” city sounds. Cars zip by, narrowly missing people and objects. Shots are fired, and ignored. Dogs continue to bark incessantly off screen. With each scene the sirens grow in volume and proximity, building towards the one sound that viewers know, but these characters cannot yet comprehend: the telltale rasp of the undead walkers. These sounds all build powerfully as the characters move towards the knowledge that the audience already has. The city noises are a wonderful contrast to the prominent sounds of the first seasons of The Walking Dead: the absolute silence of a technological, industrial society that has already ceased existing punctuated by the buzzing cicadas and blood-thirsty walkers.

On the other hand, not everything in the pilot episode came together cohesively. The writing is a little clunky, the characters and their motivations don’t yet make sense, and some of the acting feels unsatisfactory. The main characters work in a high school, which the show (unfortunately) uses as a backdrop to show Travis lecture his students about the battle of man versus nature, in which “nature always wins.” In a different classroom, Madison’s daughter Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Cary) fools around with her girlfriends while her teacher lectures on chaos theory. As attempts at textured mise-en-scène or layered storytelling, these elements feel forced.

Nonetheless, after viewing only one episode into this new show, I am looking forward to watching how the questions I posed at the beginning are addressed in the coming weeks.

[Note: This is the first of a three-part series highlighting some of Hannibal‘s unique contributions to the television world, to commemorate its final week on NBC. The images and video in this post contain spoilers. Also macabre humor.]

Hannibal completes its third (and last) season this week, despite its critical acclaim and the devotion of its passionate fanbase (known as “Fannibals”). Critics have praised the program’s reconceptualization of the horror series and its compelling version of the familiar Hannibal character, but Hannibal has left its mark in other ways as well. This short series of posts examines how Hannibal has engaged with questions of gender: in remixing the markers of quality TV, in embracing the potential of its position within the fannish archive, and in privileging a complex teen girl character within its narrative.

A common exclamation for new viewers of Hannibal is “I can’t believe this is on network!” This astonishment reflects the dominant cultural hierarchies of value in which television critics have elevated non-network shows as “quality TV” for discerning viewers over network shows largely assumed to be mindless fodder for the undiscerning masses. As Elana Levine and Michael Z. Newman have argued (and critic Noah Berlatsky recently affirmed), such critical divides of taste and value perpetuate inequalities of class and gender in which quality is associated with middle class, male audiences/”masculine” tastes, and non-quality tv with mass, largely female audiences with “feminine” tastes.

This divide has become even more obvious as white middle-class audiences have largely fled the networks, preferring the suburban pastures of original programming on HBO, Netflix, Amazon, etc. In the face of this divide, networks have been even more willing to serve the audiences that remain by developing programming for undervalued viewers such as teens, women, queer people, and people of color, many of whom still watch live TV. In addition, networks have developed more programming from less critically regarded pulp genres (as opposed to “adult dramas”) such as musicals, science fiction, and horror.

NBC’s Hannibal is unusual in its ability to bridge this cultural divide by successfully developing a “class and mass” brand that has provided an innovative, unique model of program and promotion. Hannibal‘s brand appeals to and actively serves both quality TV audiences and an intensely invested fan base, led primarily by young women utilizing social media. The easy co-existence of these seemingly odd bedfellows is particularly remarkable given that the presence of young women is often seen to degrade (“feminize”) the quality bona fides of any media product. Yet just as Hannibal queered its source material, the program’s producers were able to develop a mode of promotional address that combined quality markers with overt acknowledgements of its fandom. Far from “degrading” the text, this integration has resulted in a richer, more experimental, more politically progressive program and a more inclusive viewer experience.

In 2011, amidst the backdrop of reboots, rebranding, origin stories, and sequels, Hannibal seemed to be a perfect fit for NBC. The recent popularity of horror on American television—in series like The Walking Dead and American Horror Story—suggested to the network that a reboot of the familiar character of Hannibal Lecter would allow them to tap into this growing viewer demand. At the same time, NBC sought to establish a “quality” brand for the show. For example, the network committed to thirteen episodes rather than a full season, a break with network traditions that replicated the practices of cable’s prestige programs. The network also chose to skip the pilot stage because of the involvement of the French Gaumont studio group, who purchased the rights to the novel—and thus the characters from—Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, which would serve as the foundation for the series. The inclusion of Gaumont as a producing partner gave the show an international feel; European high-art aesthetics were evoked throughout the series, which included location filming in Paris and Florence.

Gaumont’s CEO Katie O’Connell then hired Bryan Fuller to write the first script and serve as showrunner. As the creator of several critically acclaimed series including Pushing Daisies (2007-09), Fuller brought with him his own auteur brand. He promised to reimagine the source material by altering key aspects of the original books, including diversifying the cast; focusing on character development and motivation; and establishing a signature lush, beautiful, and sophisticated style for the program that would look and feel expensive. Likewise, NBC promoted these “quality” production aesthetics throughout its publicity for the series.

Still, Hannibal struggled to find an audience on NBC, which, unlike premium outlets, needed the buy-in of at least a portion of its mass audience for the program to succeed. In this regard, the network and the program’s producers encouraged the activities of the Fannibals. Demographic research suggested that a significant portion of the audience was “young, smart, well-read women,” which delighted Fuller, who adored their creative production, their appreciation of the show’s dark humor, and their emotional investment in his development of a romance between Hannibal and Will Graham. The network embraced the community, setting up an official Tumblr account for the series and sponsoring a fan art contest (winners below). The NBC Hannibal Tumblr mods have been widely praised for their understanding of the platform and their supportive, respectful interaction with fans.

In addition, Hannibal‘s producers and cast members, led by Fuller (in flower crowns, below), have frequently used Twitter to encourage fan activity, including regularly live-tweeting episodes; re-tweeting fan art and GIFs; and giving fans access to script pages, production details, and set photos. This sense of community between the series producers and its fans generated tangible results in the form of a third season renewal, as network officials and producers have openly acknowledged. This final season has both rewarded Fannibals’ ardor and affirmed quality TV tastes by further shifting the series from its procedural beginnings. Set partially in Europe, this season utilizes an art-house style of filming and focuses on character relationships in even more depth and detail, particularly that between the two leads. By developing program content that appealed to viewers across gender and class lines and by involving and supporting their “feminized,” network audiences, Hannibal constructed both an innovative program text and a series brand that will hopefully inspire television producers working across platforms to explore more ways of blurring cultural hierarchies.

Over the last several decades a number of books, television programs, and films have created narrative universes set in post-apocalyptic times. Writers such as Mark Harris suggest that these types of narratives have grown increasingly popular out of, as he puts it, “the fear of a total systemic collapse.” These fears seem reasonable to anyone who keeps apace with current events, the near constant reminders over the growing global scarcity of clean water and food, and the dire predictions related to global climate change. These tales also seem rooted in a fascination with viewing society in its crumbled aftermath, the dissolving civility among survivors, and the lawlessness brought about by the daily challenge to stay alive, as played out in books such as The Stand, and The Night of the Living Dead films, and the television program The Walking Dead. If we think of apocalypse tales such as these as representative of a genre, perhaps as a subset of horror or science fiction, then the descriptions above create a basis for contemplating the nature of these stories, their visual and auditory styles, character tropes, and their ideological underpinnings.

In many ways, however, the apocalyptic genre seems to have significant roots in the western, another vastly popular genre in the United States. From the other side, the western encompasses many of the same thematic elements as the modern apocalypse tale: the untamed frontier, man coming to terms with the lawlessness of survival, the unrelenting harshness of nature, the desire for good to triumph over evil, and the necessity of avoiding disease, infection, and accidents in a pre-modern world. There are both ideological and stylistic connections between these two genres, at least across two recent television programs: HBO’s Deadwood (2004-2006) and The Walking Dead (2010- ), currently a record-breaking cable program in the middle of its fifth season on AMC. Both Deadwood and The Walking Dead use similar generic storytelling elements to create seemingly unbelievable worlds, one in the distant past and one in a horrific future, told partially through the tale of the reluctant lawman: Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln).

While many long-running American television westerns such as Bonanza (1959-1973) and Gunsmoke (1955-1975) predate Deadwood, the sustained serialized narrative of Deadwood, along with the unencumbered storytelling possibilities of HBO, allowed the show to feature gritty and grotesque images of the day-to-day existence of the town’s residents. Deadwood‘s insistence on focusing on the perhaps more historically “realistic” images of endless dirt, dust, and mud, the unsavory employment options for poor women, and unwashed and unruly townspeople, perhaps gave new life to the genre and prompted a resurgence in interest in these types of tales. Likewise, the sustained, multi-season run of The Walking Dead (and its future spin-off) has created new possibilities for exploring the post-apocalyptic narrative, continually focusing on these same visual and stylistic elements to define these pre- and post-modern worlds.

The most interesting intersection of these genres is the uncomfortable relationship each narrative has with technology, even when it is not specifically acknowledged. For example, built into Deadwood are instances of a burgeoning western settlement in the midst of a new social order, such as when Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) looks unhappily upon the landscape as workers install telegraph lines connecting Deadwood to the outside world. In that moment, Swearengen foresees a loss of power through this technological encroachment. On The Walking Dead, on the other hand, one of the discomforts right under the surface is the disconnect from the comforts of modern life, and the need to learn or relearn how to hunt, farm, forage, and survive with minimal modern equipment (guns, cars, bullets, etc.). At the same time, this relationship with technology is similarly loaded, particularly in the moments in which The Walking Dead‘s characters acknowledge the man-made triumphs of modern technology as the possible cause for the plague of the walking un-dead and the inability to utilize the same technologies to prevent the collapse of American society or to restore its former social order.

Can The Walking Dead be read as an unconscious desire to return to the frontier, or a cautionary warning about the destructive path of the modern world? What seems to be the clear divide between these two narratives is split between the overarching ideological subtext. Though it can be interpreted in several ways that shift over the course of the series, the characters on The Walking Dead are only able to continue their battle in their zombie apocalypse world through a continued return to the idea of hope and faith in the future. This is true as well for characters in westerns—after all, the westward expansion in the US speaks to seeking out new worlds to improve chances for a better life. This thematic thread works in westerns. After all, they are loosely based in historical fact. Viewers know the fate of these characters (and sometimes real world figures) so the tension of the survival of humanity on the frontier is moot. But in the case of The Walking Dead, the opposite is true. Each and every episode brings more turmoil, more unrest and more uncertainty to the lives of the survivors. In a world that makes no promises about humanity (or civilization) even having a future, the characters force themselves, beyond all reason, to remain hopeful for better days.

The Walking Dead is certainly not the first video game to borrow from television, particularly in terms of aesthetics and style. Alan Wake, published by Microsoft for the XBox 360 in 2010, is a full-length psychological thriller that is internally structured like a television series. ‘Levels’ of the game are presented as ‘episodes,’ each with their own arcs and cliffhanger endings. The most overt element is a “Previously On Alan Wake” cinematic that plays before each ‘episode,’ quickly recapping the events of the game so far. The function here is less practical (as it is used on actual television shows to remind viewers of possibly long-forgotten plot points) as it is much more stylistic, meant to imitate the particularly televisual device, perhaps even parodying it.

While Alan Wake certainly captures the aesthetics and presentational aspects of television, it is still a primarily singular experience. Yes, the game features episodes and levels, but games have always had levels since their very inception. Whenever Mario (well, Jumpman) would reach the Princess in Donkey Kong, he would quickly whisk her away, prompting the next ‘episode’ of conflict and adventure for our hero. But Alan Wake shows the inherent structural similarities between these two media. Both television and many video games utilize a particularly fragmented organizational style, wherein smaller yet distinct parts come together to form a whole that allows starting and stopping, as opposed to film which is meant to be experienced in a single sitting. Games often take several hours to complete, and television seasons and entire seasons certainly tie to this mode. With all of these connections, as well as the obvious fact that games are primarily played on televisions, the real question is why episodic gaming is the exception and not the rule?

An 'Episode' of Donkey Kong

The first episode of The Walking Dead game was released in April of 2012. Subsequent episodes (2-5) were released roughly every two months, meaning the entire ‘season’ of the game took about seven months to be fully released. While a disc-based, physical release containing the entire season will be released in December, over 1.2 million unique players have downloaded and experienced the game so far (and these sales numbers only take into account the first three episodes) and was the highest-selling game in August 2012. What is most fascinating about the game’s success, from an economic standpoint, is the growth in downloads from Episode 1 into later installments. Like a television show gaining viewers from season to season, The Walking Dead gained players as word spread in the months between releases. The episodic television model was not some gimmick as it played aesthetically in Alan Wake, but a financially successful distribution model for a gaming product.

There are many factors required for this system to be successful. First and foremost, digital distribution is needed by publishers like Telltale Games in order to keep costs down. The idea of packaged episodic content would raise prices exponentially, particularly considering that each episode only contains roughly 2-3 hours of content (as opposed to full-retail games ranging from 20-50 hours). Players are even able to buy a ‘Season Pass,’ getting all five episodes cheaper than buying them individually, encouraging early adoption.

Beyond the digital technology, the game had to be good, which allowed for both popular and critical acclaim to spread, increasing interest in the product while it was still on the market, so to speak. Instead of possibly buying a game most people had already purchased and played to completion, new players could ‘catch up,’ and join the conversation. Herein lies the rub; while episodic gaming is a new frontier for how developers make games, helping avoid the huge risk market of long development cycles and increased budgets, it is perhaps an even larger divergence in terms of how we play games.

Fan Art for "The Walking Dead" Game

One of the more lauded aspects of The Walking Dead is the element of player choice. The game frequently confronts players with moral and practical choices that change the plot throughout the rest of the game, with decisions as major as killing or saving certain characters. This entire system gains more worth for the player when it is shared socially, with players discussing stories and divergences in various play-throughs, leading to a variety of unique narratives. Communities like The Walking Dead Confessions (SPOILERS!) have sprung up around the game, and the episodic nature was crucial to these discussions, as posts before the final episode frequently featured theories and hopes for how the rest of the game would play out. Players were socially-constructing their play experience because of the episodic nature, rather than individualizing the experience and sharing after-the-fact.

As television continues into its (arguably) new “golden age,” the shift in video games towards the televisual model of both aesthetics and distribution may be a sign of quality to come. Despite the entrenched history of AAA-games and off-the-shelf distribution, the rise of digital and more small-scale games portends a seismic shift in the industry, for players, developers, but perhaps most importantly, for the games themselves.