MovieChat Forums > The Walking Dead (2010) Discussion > Season Two is Actually the Best One

Season Two is Actually the Best One

posted 2 months ago by Zinger (2439)
5 replies | jump to latest

First time round, when it was a weekly thing, I hated season two, it was slow and boring.

But rewatching the show now, it's actually the best season. It has a real arc, they have a genuinely safe place (long before the threat of living people became a bigger threat than the dead), and a sense of hope. When you watch weekly, it feels empty but binge-watching gives you a better sense of the story and the characters.

It was actually the best season of the show.

[–] aavfreak (3387) 2 months ago

I actually enjoyed season 2, because of exactly what you said. At the start of season 4 AMC had a marathon and I binge watched 1 - 3, while the first half of season 4 aired. Then by the time I caught up on the first half of S4, the rest of it was on the DVR and I finished it out.

Season 5 was my first real time experience.

Then going back and reading historical posts on various message boards and forums, I found out how much Season 2 was hated for how it dragged. When I was reading through these historical posts with their complaints in real time, I realized how tedious it must have been to watch week to week.

When I was reading the historical posts from season 2 after binge watching, I did find it fun to read all the speculation on what Jenner said to Rick at the end of season 1 and what could have happened to Sophia over the course of season 2.

[–] jriddle73 (408) 2 months ago

Marathoning the 2nd season would lessen the effect but it was still very poorly paced and became appallingly stupid and unfocused. It later turned out there were some good reasons for that: the original plan for season 2, which sounded great, fell apart and the creators were left trying to cobble together that crap that eventually made it to the screen in very trying circumstances (Frank Darabont, the showrunner, was fired only a few eps in, and his replacement was entirely bereft of talent).

[–] jriddle73 (408) 2 months ago

I wouldn't go to ranking them but season 2 was--like most of the rest--an incredibly bad season, showing a very dramatic creative collapse from the previous season. It wasn't just dull (though it WAS dull, and very poorly paced); it's the point at which a whole host of problems, which, years later, would strangle out the audience, first came to dominate it. The midpoint of that season was when I began writing about it and sort of documenting where it was going wrong.
https://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2012/01/walking-dead.html

[–] aavfreak (3387) 2 months ago

It's funny you link to your old blog. Every once in a while I get the urge to try to rewatch an episode or two from the early seasons. Then I end up fast forwarding through it and abandon it altogether, but the experience does remind me of these old critiques and I end up getting more enjoyment from re-reading your old blogs than watching the show.

So if every six months or so you start seeing activity on these old archives, it's likely just me. LOL

It's also heartbreaking to see that embedded link in your blog to the old IMDb forums. We'll never have anything like it again.

[–] jriddle73 (408) 2 months ago

Yeah, I really miss the old IMDb boards. I had been there and loved them for years before I started writing about THE WALKING DEAD. At the point I wrote that article, my first proper one on the series, I had been in a very bad place in life for some time, and it was writing about TWD on the IMDb board that sort of dragged me back to writing when I hadn't been doing much of it for a long time. That piece was like a formal come-back. While TWD was really taking off, I apparently tapped into some dissenting sentiment a lot of people felt about it, at a time when everyone else was going nuts over it, but hadn't quite seen put into words yet. A lot of people told me, over the years that followed, that reading my stuff made them enjoy the otherwise-bad show a lot more. It was always fun to post a new one and watch (and participate in) the food-fights they would generate, because fans of the show HATED my articles on it and took it way too seriously. My stuff was never more popular than when I was writing about TWD.

Someone once told me that, in the end, I sort of won, as everyone got sick to death of the show. But it's more the case that all the problems I was identifying while it was on the rise eventually just wore everyone down. It never really got any worse--season 3 was, in my view, the low-point and it was still on the rise then. It just took a while for everyone to get sick of it.