RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Media AMC Puts Darabount on Kirkman's Walking Dead

• AMC is giving us a huge deal of support and they have already shown that they have a lot of confidence in the show just by immediately picking up the six episode first season without ever even starting to shoot the pilot, which I’m told is fairly unusual, so I’m pretty excited with how the process has been going so far.
  
  Everyone’s moving full speed ahead. That’s kind of a fun thing because like you say you talked to Frank like five years ago and there was a time when it was going to be a pilot at NBC, but that kind of fell through and Frank kind of stayed in the picture and kept in touch with me and did his best to do things behind the scenes to try and get it made because he really likes the comic and I think was really gung-ho about making it.
  
  The funny thing to me is five years went by and it was a little bit more than a year ago when Frank called me and said “Hey, I think AMC is interested in this.” They optioned it in September of last year, I think, and then in January they were like “Hey, we are making the show.” Then from January up until now, it has been nonstop. It just cracks me up how things can move so slowly and then as soon as they decide to make a show it’s like a hundred things happening at once.
  
  So right now it’s like full speed ahead and they are moving forward with this pilot. I wrote the first episode and then they are going to be shooting all summer for the first six episodes. Frank is in Atlanta right now doing prep, so he’s kind of hard at it. They start shooting in, I think, a week....
  
  Anything you have seen in BREAKING BAD we can do every minute of our show. And then also there’s a lot of things you can get away with, because they are zombies, so you will be seeing all kinds of cool stuff that you would expect to see in THE WALKING DEAD: THE TV SHOW, so while it isn’t a pay cable channel, I think that people are still going to get what they want.

Time says:

… judging by the first two episodes of its six-episode debut season, the scariest part of the series is not what the animated corpses do but what the surviving humans are driven to do. … If The Walking Dead can build on its promise and run with these ideas, along with unflinching gross-out thrills, it can tell a doomsday story with all the things zombies crave: brains, guts and heart.

Entertainment Weekly says:

… a success as a comic-book series written by Robert Kirkman, and deserves to be an even bigger success in this clever, gross, humane AMC version. …

TV Guide says:

… packs a raw, emotional punch while delivering the creepy and queasy thrills all genre fans truly crave. …

The Wall Street Journal says:

… has a pilot episode so good that it has hooked even a zombie hater like me. …

USA Today says:

… It will be a hard sell for some viewers, but for people who love monster movies or zombie comic books, Dead may be just their cup of blood. …

The New York Times says:

… surprisingly scary and remarkably good, a show that visually echoes the stylized comic-book aesthetic of the original and combines elegant suspense with gratifyingly crude and gruesome slasher-film gore. …

The Los Angeles Times says:

… seamlessly stitches together grand American traditions including the western, the separated-family drama and, of course, the post-apocalypse tale, creating the first zombie epic, with sprawling storylines, archetypal characters and imagery to rival "Gone With the Wind." … like any good horror tale, still believes in the importance of monsters, perfectly balancing the struggle of basic human decency with those palsied four-in-the-morning moments when we are convinced that everyone around us is trying to eat us alive.

The Washington Post says:

… Darabont and his cast excel at conjuring up a taut social study, but let the horror scenes fall oddly flat. Being a big fraidy cat myself, I can only puzzle over why "The Walking Dead" fails to cause my usual reflexive responses, such as putting my hands over my eyes and still watching what happens through parted fingers. I hope it gets scarier. Despite that, the show is undeniably intriguing and creepily contemporary, tapping into the national paranoia: Can I trust you? Are you one of them? How do we go on, now that we're surrounded? The things all Americans ask, every day, amid the din of moaning. …

HitFix says:

… Going into the show as someone without deep affection for either the genre or the source material, I still found myself riveted by the pilot episode, which will air in a 90-minute timeslot on Halloween. Written and directed by Darabont, it’s a master class in suspense filmmaking, of dread and atmosphere and grief. … becomes a more conventional, less interesting zombie story. The technical work remains impeccable ... but the story, the suspense and the characters (Lincoln’s co-stars include Sarah Wayne Callies, Jon Bernthal and Jeffrey DeMunn) all begin to feel familiar quickly - not just from the comic, but dozens of zombie and/or post-apocalyptic yarns. …

TV Squad says:

… unquestionably a cut above most scary fare … There are those who may prefer the intensity of 'The Walking Dead's' pilot, but for me, it was a relief when the second episode of 'The Walking Dead' dialed down the suspense and turned the show into a more recognizable "band of survivors on a mission" tale. If 'The Walking Dead' had sustained the first episode's level of tension indefinitely, the show would have lost me. …

The Boston Globe says:

… so fully dynamic and engaging. … delivers extended sequences that are riveting despite the small amounts of dialogue — note his strategic use of bunny slippers on a little-girl zombie in the first minutes of the premiere. Darabont also gives us a lot of opportunities to bond with his characters, something too many sci-fi TV shows (“The Event’’) fail to do. Without screaming or sobbing or schmaltz, the characters have moments when they convey a sympathetic sense of emotional devastation. …

Variety says:

… Although we've seen no shortage of zombies and post-apocalyptic stories, producer-writer-director Frank Darabont has deftly tackled the seemingly perilous task of adapting a comicbook about zombies into a viable episodic series. Arising in the wake of the brainy "Rubicon" and "Mad Men's" stellar fourth season, "Dead" demonstrates AMC's creative team has plenty of life in it. … what "The Walking Dead" has done most shrewdly is to take what could be a stale premise and enlivened it in a way that feels unexpectedly fresh. …