Okay, I’ll admit it.
I stopped watching The Walking Dead in season 3. Why?
Well, because I was bored. (And yes, I know I’m in the minority with that opinion.)
I was never really able to connect to the characters, though I really liked Glenn and Daryll. Season 3 is commonly ranked as one of the best but the high-stakes just weren’t enough to keep me hooked.
For me, the opposite happened with Tales of the Walking Dead.
This series allows each episode to focus on a much smaller cast of characters without the story getting lost in the process. Though I’ll admit, I’ve always been more interested in the arrival of the apocalypse and the nature of zombies themselves than what remains of the survivors.
My favorite episodes of this anthology were Blair; Gina and Amy; Dr. Everett.
The former provides us with a ground-level view of the arrival of the apocalypse. Blair and Gina are two ordinary office workers who experience the suppressed but frantic desperation of people who know there is something wrong and want to save themselves.
The kind of chaos in this episode is the kind I search for in every apocalyptic television show or movie. The threat of zombies takes to the side and the unpredictability of human nature becomes the real danger.
The latter episode takes on a gentler tone as we follow Amy, who is part of a survivor community, being saved by Dr. Everett, a scientist studying the walkers.
His research proving that walkers are more like living animals than any character in this universe would like to admit, creates a new perspective for us as viewers. Thousands of years ago humans were nowhere near the top of the food chain and this episode proves that nature has reverted back to its original format.
This episode also ends in an impactful way, with the transformation of one character into a walker hammering in the fact that the extinction of the human race is somehow inevitable.
Tales of the Walking Dead is by no means perfect, with disturbing yet lackluster episodes in Dee and La Dona, but it succeeds where The Walking Dead does not, in my opinion.
By focusing on smaller stories and characters in different settings throughout the timeline of this universe, it succeeds in expanding the original universe and also helps it feel more real.
I really hope that season 2 of the anthology is in the works, otherwise it would seem that this is the end of the exploration of the Walking Dead universe for me.
Right Writing Words 
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