The Walking Dead: Season 6 (AMC, 2015-2016)

Figure 1: Promotional image for season six of The Walking Dead

The most watched non-sports show in the history of cable television, AMC’s The Walking Dead has capitalized on both the popularity of the zombie and the format of adult-oriented “prestige” cable television.[1] Revolving around a group of survivors following a pandemic, the show’s sixth season finds the cast in the community of Alexandria, where a walled-off housing development has kept its residents safe from the rest of the world. The eight episodes of the first half of the season that aired in Fall 2015 depict the clash between the grizzled veterans, led by Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and the sheltered citizens of Alexandria, who possess little to no survival skills. The Walking Dead makes for interesting television, but not only for its narrative and formal contributions. In considering the way the show’s viewers consume The Walking Dead, we can explore the social operations of contemporary mainstream television.

If television has long connoted a shared experience where coworkers discuss the previous evening’s episode around the water cooler, then the advent of social media adds additional ways in which that culture functions. In the case of the sixth season of The Walking Dead, the show encourages its viewers to become media analysts while simultaneously (and inadvertently) revealing the shifting priorities in consuming commercial television; narrative structure and formal realism takes precedence over identity politics and representations of race.

We can see this in the way that specific plot points become focal nodes for discussion. This is a compelling method for thinking about “event TV,” such prestigious programs as the other fêted AMC shows, Mad Men (2007-2015) and Breaking Bad (2008-2013). Comparable and contemporaneous to Walking Dead is the fifth season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, where viewers continue to debate the possible death of Jon Snow (Kit Harrington). For The Walking Dead, it is in the sixth season character arc of Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun) where we can observe this interplay between text and audience.

Figure 2. Steven Yeun as Glenn Rhee.

Near the end of the third episode of the season, “Thank You” (10/25/15), a pack of zombies seemingly disembowel Glenn. The seventh episode, “Head’s Up” (11/22/15) reveals that zombies were instead devouring Nicholas (Michael Traynor), who had fallen on top of Glenn and allowed him to crawl to safety. In the month that separated the two episodes, Glenn’s predicament was discussed across the internet, motivated by two major questions: the obvious one as to whether Glenn was dead or not, but also the question concerning what the outcome of the episode would mean. Fans and critics posited that the way that The Walking Dead handled the character of Glenn would have serious repercussions for both the producers and AMC. A crucial element of this discourse was the idea that The Walking Dead was manipulating its audience by toying with their emotional investment in the character. Not only did viewers have to wait four weeks to receive closure (a dissatisfaction which hints at the impact of Netflix and “binge watching” against the traditional practice of waiting for new episodes), the text itself milked both possible outcomes—life and death—for maximum effect.

This manipulation engendered an additional component to viewing: in suggesting Glenn’s death, The Walking Dead encouraged the practice of formal analysis. As Yeun himself commented during an episode of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon (NBC, 11/25/15), a cottage industry of analysis emerged with pundits offering “definitive” answers, testimonials legitimized by close analysis.

These scrutinizing viewers examined shot after shot of the episode, parsing out clues such as Glenn’s walkie-talkie, his position in relation to Nicholas, and the blocking of the space, hypothesizing whether or not Glenn could plausibly crawl under the dumpster or not.[2] The approach was interdisciplinary: viewers considered human anatomy and how the zombies were pulling intestines from a point that was far too high on Glenn’s chest for them to be his own. This is not to say that such a practice of close reading is new, but social media makes it more visible and perhaps even more mainstream.

The discourse around Glenn offers additional insight in the overarching sentiment amongst many, including numerous popular blogs where viewers felt that the show had to kill Glenn.[3] The suggestion is that Glenn must die so that the show may preserve its narrative integrity. What makes this noteworthy is a structuring absence in the discourse regarding a core component of the character: his race. This is an unremarkable detail on its own; however, it is all the more peculiar when considering how much the show and its audience are engaged with identity politics. There is rampant discussion of African-American representation and feminist empowerment in The Walking Dead.[4] And yet, little is said about one of the only male Asian-American characters on mainstream television, one who is sexualized through a prominent interracial relationship with a white woman. Interestingly enough, only other Asian American men such as celebrity chef Eddie Huang – who also has a vested interest in the issue as with his former involvement in ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat (2014-) – have commented on this aspect of the character.[5]

Interactive social media practices juggle the importance of formal narrative realism as well as the “fair” representation of minorities. The sixth season of The Walking Dead exposes moments where one is elided in favor of the other, producing a situation where the call for equal representation is decidedly unequal. This attests to the continued hegemony of realism, where narrative mandates of verisimilitude persist even in unreal worlds, overcoming our politics, identity or otherwise.

Author biography:

Se Young Kim is a PhD candidate of Film Studies in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on his dissertation, titled “Crisis in Neoliberal Asia: Violence in Contemporary Korean and Japanese Cinema.” His research areas include contemporary East Asian cinema, contemporary U.S. cinema, ideology in new media, and intermedial representations of violence.

Notes

1. Allen St. John, “‘The Walking Dead’ Season 5 Premiere Breaks Ratings Record as the Most Watched Cable Show of All Time,” Forbes, October 13, 2014, accessed December 30, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/allenstjohn/2014/10/13/the-walking-dead-season-5-premiere-breaks-ratings-record-as-the-most-watched-cable-show-of-all-time/

2. Alex McCowan and Josh Modell, “A Walking Dead Theory So Far-Fetched It Just Has To Be True (or Not),” AVClub, October 26, 2015, accessed December 30, 2015, http://www.avclub.com/video/walking-dead-theory-so-far-fetched-it-just-has-be-227414

3. Elisabeth Vincentelli, “How ‘The Walking Dead’ Blew It with Glenn,” The New York Post, November 23, 2015, accessed December 30, 2015, http://nypost.com/2015/11/23/how-the-walking-dead-blew-it-with-glenn/

4. Lorraine Berry, “‘Walking Dead’: Still a White Patriarchy,” Salon, April 1, 2013, accessed December 30, 2015, http://www.salon.com/2013/04/01/walking_dead_still_a_white_patriarchy/

5. Joe Rogan, “Eddie Huang & Randall Park,” The Joe Rogan Experience, January 26, 2015, accessed December 30, 2015, http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/eddie-huang-randall-park/