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.

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.

My own interest in writing this piece was sparked when I read Fred E. H. Schroeder’s 1973 essay “Video Aesthetics and Serial Art,” in the first edition of Horace Newcomb’s edited anthology Television: The Critical View (1976). The articles contemplating television aesthetics, such as Schroeder’s and Newcomb’s “Toward a Television Aesthetic,” disappear in later editions of this book. As Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz note in their book Television Studies, “the contents of the volume shifted considerably from journalists to academics over the first few editions” (18). Indeed, Gray and Lotz make a “gentle call” for a “more successful reintegration of aesthetics and critical analysis” as a “key frontier” for the future of television studies (53). This type of work exists, even if it does not explicitly call itself that: Julie D’Acci’s Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney & Lacey, Jeremy Butler’s Television Style, and a whole section of essays in Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell’s How to Watch Television. But why hasn’t there been a bigger return to this analytical area?

I think there are a few factors that complicate this issue. For one, in the last decade there has been a clear shift in the public perception of television from the denigrated also-ran to a medium taken seriously by viewers as a prominent art form, a reputation that films and filmmakers have enjoyed for several decades. Likewise, aesthetics seems more clearly or naturally articulated in discussion of film than it does with television. Does this speak to a tension in television studies and television scholars, who may want to continue to distance themselves from film studies in regards to carving out its own disciplinary boundaries?

From another perspective, David Thorburn writes about this issue, rooting the problem less in the medium and more in terms of language. In his 1987 paper “Television as an Aesthetic Medium” he writes that “the adjective ‘aesthetic’ is problematic, I realize. But I know no other word to use for the qualities I wish to identify in our popular culture and specifically in our television system” (162). Despite the complicated nature of this term, he notes that he wants to employ it not as “a valuing of aesthetic objects” but rather for use as “a designation of their chief defining feature—their membership in a class of cultural experiences understood to be fictional or imaginary, understood to occur in a symbolic, culturally agreed upon imaginative space” (162).

In yet another way perhaps the early writing set the stage for a complicated relationship between television studies and aesthetics. Some articles from the 1960s and 1970s focus more on what television in this era couldn’t do rather than what it could do. Schroeder writes at length about the smallness of television image and television’s inability to transform “televised” arts within its at-the-time technological parameters. Evelina Tarroni’s article “The Aesthetics of Television” spends considerable time debating whether television is “art” or “merely a technical means of transmission which adds nothing to, and introduces no change, in the subject matter transmitted” (437). These aesthetic contemplations, while worthy of continued examination, are very much products of their time. Articles like this at their core were defensive arguments that had to first convince readers that television is art, and that television isn’t film. Since this line of thinking is less necessary for contemporary audiences, there is no longer a need to differentiate between the ideas that were at the center of these early television aesthetic discussions. These lines have been largely erased, between television actors and film actors, or between television texts and film texts.

From my perspective, what makes the conversation about aesthetics so productive, and instructive, is the reconnection of analyses that consider the form, content, and context of television programs, and relinking cultural studies and television aesthetics in a multitude of texts: old and new television programs; cult, popular, or unpopular programs; particular seasons or series as a whole; special episodes; mythology or monster-of-the week episodes; serial or episodic programs; groups of programs on networks or cable channels; “online” television, etc. In this regard, writers might also want to consider the ways in which different modes of distribution, reception, availability of texts, and their historical trajectories might inform aesthetic analysis.

From my own teaching perspective, I came to these questions and concerns from reading television studies research from the 1970s, but also from what felt like a classroom problem: why is it so easy for my students to talk about the form and content of films I show in class, when they have such difficulties connecting form and content in our analysis of television programs? Is it because television programs are devoid of form? Of course not, so let’s figure this out together.

This is the sixth post in Antenna’s series The Aesthetic Turn, which examines questions of cultural studies and media aesthetics. If you missed any of the earlier posts in the series, they can be read here.

We are in a moment in which many viewers are turning to basic cable channels like USA, AMC, and A&E for “quality” television programming, including shows such as AMC’s trifecta of Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead. While problematic on a number of levels to some viewers, these programs nonetheless attract huge audiences. Recently The Walking Dead in particular broke ratings records with over 12 million viewers for the Season 3 finale episode “Welcome to the Tombs” on March 31st of this year. This season of the program featured the usual violence against the living and undead alike. It also featured an extended sequence of episodes that centered on the threat of sexual violence against Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and perhaps Andrea (Laurie Holden). While these characters somehow fared better than Michonne (Danai Gurira) did in the Walking Dead comic books, it was still a gruesome reminder that this type of onscreen violence is commonplace on contemporary cable programs. Likewise, Bates Motel (A&E), Mad Men (AMC), and Sons of Anarchy (FX) (among other programs that I haven’t watched) have all featured similarly disturbing sequences in their storylines.

This type of onscreen violence against women has made several of these otherwise compelling programs unwatchable. In her December 2012 article “Why American Television Needs a Break from Violence, Conspiracies, and Maybe Even Serialized Storytelling,” Alyssa Rosenberg writes about being “exhausted” by several current television programs that are heavy on “shocking violence.” While she doesn’t specifically address sexual violence, I think she makes an apt point; while neither Rosenberg nor I want to see an end to television programs that have violence at their core, can we all at least discuss its place and purpose? On one hand, programs like The Walking Dead have the potential to serve as brilliant allegorical tales that force viewers to question the relationship between the zombie apocalypse and our fears over the crumbling stability of our own present social/political/economic world. On the other hand, what narrative purpose does it serve to show in detail the Governor’s (David Morrissey) sexual degradation of Maggie? Can these scenes be alluded to and be as powerful?

On Wednesday, a related article by Margaret Lyons made the rounds on Twitter and Facebook. In “Maxing out on Murder: Good Luck Finding a Decent TV Drama Without Rape or Killing,” she writes that she “can’t watch any more murder shows. Or rape shows. I’m maxed out.” This article gets at some great questions to ask about our present (or continuing) fascination with observing violence from afar. Why are these acts so popular on television? What does it mean that television programs continue to use sexual violence to define the psyches of male and female characters? Why is this entertaining?

This discussion is not meant to say that these programs should not be on the air. Nor do I want to suggest that these programs aren’t entertaining—I will continue to watch several of these programs. But I am not drawn to these programs because they feature rape/murder. I am drawn to them because they tell interesting and compelling stories, which sometimes include the darker side of humanity. As well, I hope that the current discussion over the preponderance of graphic depictions of rape/murder is not relegated to female media scholars and critics. This concerns men as well. It is just as disconcerting that the central motivation of several male characters is their murderous bloodlust and/or their desire to enact violence against women. Surely this, too, is a disservice to the male viewers of these programs.

On the other hand, perhaps this situation is good for the networks: these graphic depictions usually fall outside of what is permissible on network television, where FCC regulations—and the Standards and Practices departments who self-regulate in accordance to those regulations—limit what can be shown. This “disadvantage” of broadcast content could be advantageous in this instance, forcing viewers to interpret and use their imaginations and perhaps propelling producers and writers to be more creative with their stories. Will viewers come back to network television if it can promise complicated stories that leave some images to the viewers’ imaginations?

To close, some hopefulness: here is a great follow-up to Lyons’ Vulture.com article, in which Alyssa Rosenberg celebrates some great television programs that break from the rape/murder cycle without sacrificing the level of quality and depth that viewers have come to expect.

This perennial desire to exploit new media for educational purposes exemplifies the profound power attributed to two institutions in the United States: education and technology. To this day education persists, at least symbolically, as the major mechanism of social and cultural uplift, credited with the ability to enable improved intellectual abilities, greater personal fulfillment, better employment, and increased material wealth. Despite a long track record of uneven results, there remains a collective faith in new technology and its unending and always renewing promise to enhance and improve education.

Why do we continuing look to new media for educational quick-fixes? In the September 1956 issue of Educational Screen, Benjamin C. Willis, then General Superintendent of Chicago Schools, attempted to answer this question. He wrote that “it is only fitting that education, which creates technological advance, which makes it possible for our engineers, scientists, and scholars to invent and create new media, should take advantage of some of its products and attempt to use these new advances in the instructional process” (273). Perhaps Willis’s statement explains the oft-repeated rhetoric that touts the educational potential of new media—schools embrace these innovations because they are the intellectual products of the young people who have been taught in these institutions. In this way new media represent the cyclical nature of forward-thinking educational experiments that use new media to mold minds to create new media technologies. They are the realization of the promise of education.

Regardless of the broad interest in a new medium’s earliest days, such as the current stream of articles touting MOOCs, what tends to follow is a steep drop-off in attention when one of two things occurs: either the medium fails to deliver in quantifiable ways, or the next new medium becomes financially viable; the “old” is cast aside to make way for the new. This cycle of obsession over new media and the subsequent disavowal of it creates the cycle of what I term “media amnesia,” whereby the promise of yet-another new technology restarts the dialogue on the perceived potential of a new medium without a thorough investigation into the previous medium’s “failures.”

While nearly all new media can be examined as part of this cycle, the most troubling aspect of the rhetoric about the MOOCs is the short-sided nature of the discussions. People such as Thomas Friedman attribute a great deal of promise to MOOCs with particular attention to how they might be used to educate students more effectively or more cheaply in place of traditional classrooms. But the discussion needs to accommodate bigger questions—not on the MOOCs’ own specific attributes, but ones that interrogate within a historically situated context of previous new media. Most contemporary popular press articles fail to contextualize their arguments within the successes and failures of old new media. Adding historical context to the discussion would reveal a pattern of new media, that had previously been regarded as having the potential to reinvent the classroom, but that in the end was only a panacea.

This discussion cannot just be about the supporters and detractors speaking to like-minded audiences. Of course, a number of factors complicate any current investigation. For one, the promise of the “new” seems to be a deeply ingrained tendency in American culture, in terms of our complex relationships with technology, family, work, and the government, with little incentive to contextualize current events with historical evidence. From a capitalistic standpoint, the promotion of new technology for the classroom at once fulfills the emphasis on economic growth through consumer spending and connects it to publicly funded, mandatory education in the United States, a further instance of ways in which individuals and businesses have attempted to monetize privately a seemingly not-for-profit institution. The disconnect between academic research and popular press writing about old new media is also creating two different lines of inquiry that need to be in dialogue with one another. Are all of these issues resolvable or is the disconnect between academics, teachers, for-profit online education companies, and writers just another symptom of the breakdown of in-depth long-form journalism? And what is really at stake here: educating students, saving money, shifting the role of schools and teachers, and/or making private companies more money?