View From the Phlipside – Zombies!!!!!

My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media.  TV, Radio, the movies and more.  I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this The View From the Phlipside

Television is always looking for the next big thing.  And once they find something that the audience wants you tend to get lots and lots and lots of that kind of show.  For example we’ve done westerns and cop shows and detective show.  Sitcoms and soap operas.  More recently there has been a variation on the old police procedural by adding in the whole forensics/CSI thing.  We seen shows that center on geeks and nerds have a real run recently.  Even vampires have had a whole slew of shows.  So what’s the next big thing?  Well it never hurts to keep an eye peeled on the cable channel AMC because of late they’ve been on a run with shows like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad”.  So I was very interested to see the announcement that they had just green lighted a pilot for a zombie show.

That’s right, Zombies.  The show is titled “The Walking Dead” is based on a graphic novel of the same name about the usual post-zombie-apocalypse group of human survivors trying to keep their brains from being eaten.  Right out of the gate the show has some interest because they’ve landed Frank Darabont to write and direct.  The name may not mean much to most but he was responsible for movies like “The Green Mile” and “The Shawshank Redemption”.  So he’s got some pretty good credentials.

What interests me is what may come from this new show?  I can’t think of any zombie based TV series before this one.  The occasional walk on but that’s about it.  It also interests me that the current trend has been to make the socially unacceptable character acceptable.  I can think of two recent show trends that have done this.  First are the vampire shows.  “Angel” is a long way, a loooooooong way from “Dark Shadows” when it comes to the personality of the vampire.  From creepy blood sucker to sexy, sophisticated…blood sucker.  The other one is making nerds cool.  Whether it’s goth science nerd Abby on “NCIS”,  the lovely and computer geeky Garcia on “Criminal Minds”, or the swoon inducing math genius of Charlie Epps on “Numb3rs” these are not your parents geeks.  Not that this nerd is complaining.

But where would you go with zombies?  It’s going to be hard to come with a romantic story arc for a rotting flesh, drooling, shambling zombie.  Of course it would give you the chance to have a male character really mean it when he tells a girl that he loves her for her brains.

Who knows the zombie might just be the program concept that wouldn’t die.

Call that The View From the Phlipside