The essence of a Western is the void and the the unpleasant things that lurk in it. Sometimes that void is physical emptiness: the stretch of land between a man and a train he desperately wants to catch, a remote graveyard where no one will know or care if you dig. And sometimes the vacancy is moral, a place where men and woman have passed beyond the rule of law, and the rule of law scrabbles to regain its hold.Deadwood is such a place, as is the San Francisco of Dirty Harry. To create a void like that today, film and television artists have three choices. They can go back in time, as the Coen brothers are doing in their remake of True Grit. They can find contemporary echoes of past lawlessness, as FX did with neo-Nazism and moonshine on Justified. Or they can scour the landscape with an apocalypse and literally recreate the sparsely populated North American continent. Only this time, the Indians are victims too, and the predators are monsters.
It's this third choice that's been most popular recently in books like The Passage and Year Zero, and movies like Monsters. The Walking Dead is situated squarely, and consciously, in the same tradition. From the moment Rick Grimes (the excellent Andrew Lincoln, utterly transcending his sweet blandness in the role he's best known for in Love, Actually) awakens—gut-shot, in an abandoned hospital, only to find the parking lot full of executed corpses, a vivisected body crawling through a neighborhood lawn and his family gone—we're waiting for him to shower, get back in uniform and ten-gallon hat, and mount a horse headed back to Atlanta.
Anyway, despite the fact that it's not directly up my alley, the show is a considerable and impressive work. I'm considering checking out the comics (my understanding is that they follow a fairly familiar pattern of authoritarianism in extreme crisis) for further reference—any recommendations as to whether I should or shouldn't?