No show in TV history is as malleable as The Walking Dead: Characters can be shredded as easily as script pages; settings can be swapped on the fly. Is it really that far-fetched to imagine a Walking Dead season like Mad Men‘s Season 5, one in which cinematic styles are inserted and ejected like shotgun shells and experimentation isn’t just something performed on unwilling subjects in poorly lit basements?
I found the premiere to be plenty gripping and generally entertaining. But I also found it to be formally ambitious in a way The Walking Dead almost never is. It played with time and expectations. It shifted from black-and-white to color as easily as it switched from violence to anguish.
I’d love a bottle episode told from the perspective of a dog. I want Sasha, Michonne, and Carol to go off on a supply run and seriously consider never coming back. I want a multi-episode arc about a high-status idiot making the most of the end of the world. (If it sounds like I’m talking about The Last Man on Earth with brain-sucking ghouls banging on the mansion windows and knocking over the margarita pool, you’re exactly right.) I want The Walking Dead to push past the limits of its own grim psychology and experience the kind of crazy that has nothing to do with sorrow-beards and crossbow bolts. Keep the body count high. But, for once, let The Walking Dead actually live.