THE WALKING DEAD third season premiere aired last night and, aside from being awesome, raked in the biggest ratings for any basic cable series ever. The premiere airing scored 10.9 million viewers and if you include the encore showing the entire night garnered over 15 million. I think we can rest assured that there will be several more seasons after this one.
For those of you who watched, there were zombie killings galore and the arrival at the long-heralded prison. For fans of the comics, we know where this is headed. Season one and two both deviated from the comic plot in various ways (Shane, Dale, the CDC) and I think the show will differ this season as well. Even last night we saw things happen that never did in the comic. But, where the comic concludes the prison story is too epic and too big to not incorporate. The ending of the prison arc is the equivalent to The Red Wedding in GAME OF THRONES.
My biggest peeve with last night’s episode was that in the season 2 finale, we saw the prison not too far from where the characters were camped. But, last night it seems as if months have passed and they are just finding it. Getting to the prison did give us a lot of action and tension, but I find it hard to believe they will be able to wrap it all up in a single season. Even in the comic, Robert Kirkman had to deviate to stand alone novels to flesh out the stories he couldn’t fit.
Showrunner Glenn Mazzara had this to say to TV Line about the prison: “The way I look at this prison is, when the outbreak happened, there was a zombie movie that took place in a prison. And one day maybe we’ll go back and film that movie, and now our guys come in, and they’re sort of the sequel to what happened.”
So far the only stories not centered on our group of survivors have been the web series AMC premiered this season and last. Could AMC be willing to greenlight a stand-alone TV movie that gives us the backstory on the prison? Could we get a series, similar to AMERICAN HORROR STORY, that focuses a single season on a different WALKING DEAD universe story, unrelated to the main one? That would be awesome. The more quality zombie television, the better.
Whether we get that series or movie or not, I am just happy THE WALKING DEAD is back.
