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bored chick, I am not excited either and I was a huge fan of the first three seasons. What a wet blanket this show is turning into. I hope it doesn't completely sell out.
How can it turn so weak? Isn't this one of the most successful current shows on tv? If our hypothesis is true and that this downturn in quality is a budget thing, how can that be an acceptable explanation? I know we don't know the details, we are not involved in the making of the show. It's just that it is hard to believe such a successful show could have a shrinking budget to work with.
I'm not getting where you believe there is a downturn in quality because of a stunted budget? The walkers have better cgi than before, the quality right there is better.
thefragile: I didn't mean cgi. Budget has been mentioned several times throughout this thread as a possible explanation for the downturn in quality as a complete show. Some of us are very frustrated in direction the show has gone.
bored chick, I am not excited either and I was a huge fan of the first three seasons. What a wet blanket this show is turning into. I hope it doesn't completely sell out.
How can it turn so weak? Isn't this one of the most successful current shows on tv? If our hypothesis is true and that this downturn in quality is a budget thing, how can that be an acceptable explanation? I know we don't know the details, we are not involved in the making of the show. It's just that it is hard to believe such a successful show could have a shrinking budget to work with.
The boring "bottle" episodes featuring people we don't care about are killing this show. Those episodes are boring. I never make it past 9:30 before I fall asleep on them. Also, they need to change the scenery a bit. All they have done for 5 seasons is run around the forest, scavenging and killing walkers. It's starting to get old and stale.
Killing walkers is definitely stale. I'm so over it. How many knives to the head can we see?
They need to have the walkers start killing the cast mates for a change. I want to see Abe chomped up and the rest of the cast who's name I don't care to remember.
I also want to see these cast members "turn", and go after and kill the Maggies' and the Taras'
Otherwise this show's shelf life is coming to an end. They only last a few years anyway.
I'm excited for the second half of season 5, but I'm optimistic about what can happen.
Personally, i think the show has improved greatly over seasons 2 and 3. Season 2 had a good opening episode, a good midseason finale with the shootout at the barn, and then the last three episodes were excellent... all the others were basically filler, with an occasional exciting moment. Season 3 had its moments as well, but also suffered from too many filler episodes.
The problem I had with season 4 was them starting off nicely, and then we get two episodes completely centered on The Governor. I think it would have been better to have maybe 10-12 minutes of The Governor each episode.
I think I might wait until the end of the season and then catch up all at once. If it improves, that is.
They have to stop:
With the filler stuff
Making bad choices (and then living through them)
Meeting up with Evil Geniuses (seriously, is Me and Mini Me next?)
I agree with the filler stuff. They only have 16 episodes per season, divided into 8 in fall and 8 in spring. That's not a lot, and they have no reason for filler. Every episode should be concise and cohesive. That's one of my few complaints with this guilty pleasure of mine.
I do think there were fewer filler "episodes" this season, but there were a lot of filler scenes.
They also need to stop adding characters until they fully develop the ones they have now. That's one of the major reasons for all of the filler. It took them two and a half seasons to make us give a damn about Beth, just so she could serve as a plot device? II'm not sure if that was cheap or smart, so they didn't have to kill off a more established character, but still...
I also agree with your "making bad choices" statement, but only because of the caveat at the end. Regular humans are going to make bad choices in dire situations. Hell, we make bad choices now. What bothers me (and this was probably the point you were trying to make) is that they have really stood by the whole red shirt trope in killing off ancillary characters and keeping the main characters alive. I think they are trying to do better--after all, they killed off Bob early on this season, and they killed off Beth, but it doesn't make sense that Daryl, Michonne, Rick, Glenn, etc. have cheated death so many times already. And it's not that I want to see them die, but I want to see something that actually shocks me for once. (OK, Beth's death did shock me, but I'm not as shocked as I would have been if, say, Michonne died.)
And speaking of Michonne and Daryl, I'm sick of how they are superheroes. It's cool to a point, but they never get into serious trouble and it's becoming boring. We get it; they are bad asses. Enough already.
I'm not sure about the Evil Geniuses thing though. None of the people they have met up with have been geniuses. They were just varying degrees of ruthless. The writers are trying to point out, admittedly in a heavy handed way, that people are more dangerous than Walkers. The part about that which I find interesting is the different ways in which each "leader"--the Governor, Gareth, and stupid Dawn--has chosen to make his or her "subjects" believe in the greater good.
That's a common trope in this type of genre: having a "monster" to defeat. It's also a common theme with the comics, from what I understand: meeting up with and dispatching one ruthless leader, only to move on to one who is even worse.
I do think the whole Dawn storyline was stupid though, and it was anticlimactic because she wasn't that fearsome a character.
In summation, the writers need to tighten things up and stop being all over the place, but I don't think it matters. They have a large core of fans, they have enormous ratings, and they were renewed for a sixth season. I don't see them stopping anytime soon.
What's weird is that, in every day conversation, I RARELY meet people who actually watch this show. I also know a lot of people, like my boyfriend for example, who can't stand to watch it anymore. So I'm wondering where these huge ratings are coming from, and what their core audience is.
Evil Genius was intentional hyperbole, but you get what I mean, right? In a lawless society, you will definitely have to watch out for the ruthlessness in people to come out, I agree. But the story lines are ridiculous.
1) Shane going off the deep end like he did as far as he did.
2) The sociopath governor who combed his zombie daughter's hair and had human heads in fish tanks as trophies.
3) The cannibals who started out as being gentle people but became sociopath cannibals - as a group - after a run-in and escape from another brutal group.
It's too muahaha-ish.
I see bands of renegades forming like the one that Darryl ran with for a while. I see reinforced communities forming not unlike Woodburry (sp?), and being run by a variety of people or governing systems. Even good ones.
It's just too weird.
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and I was a huge fan of the first three seasons. What a wet blanket this show is turning into. I hope it doesn't completely sell out. 
