Breathing new life into a franchise that even a die-hard (pardon the puns) horror fan like myself has grown weary of, as casts scatter and tiresomely odious human antagonists keep obscuring the zombie-scape, Tales of the Walking Dead is a welcome reminder that less can be more.
I’ve seen four of the six episodes of this eclectic anthology of stand-alone Walking Dead vignettes, and while this format is uneven by its very nature, I’m especially encouraged by the shifting tones these stories attempt, from whimsy to the usual gory suspense with a side of existential despair. Dare I say that at its best, Tales even evokes Rod Serling‘s classic The Twilight Zone in its imaginative expansion of genre and mastery of short-form storytelling.
The first episode is the most conventional, a satisfying mismatched-buddy road trip starring Terry Crews and Olivia Munn as a disaster-prepper survivalist and a freer spirit each looking for connection. They’re at each others’ throats until they realize they’re each other’s best chance at staying alive. Hardly a new epiphany, but there are some fun twists and they sell it. The next episode (streaming Sunday on AMC+ and airing on the linear channel on August 21) is the wildest of the bunch I’ve seen, an amusingly harrowing time-loop fantasy with Parker Posey (a flamboyantly toxic boss) and Jillian Bell (her disgruntled employee) in the first confusing throes of the apocalypse. How many times will they have to die, often explosively, before they get over themselves and face up to what’s actually happening?
Most of the episodes available for preview are basically two-handers, suggesting the mandate here was to keep the stories intimate and personal. That’s certainly the case with the one installment I’ve seen that calls back to the original series. “Dee,” the third episode (August 28 on AMC), is an origin story of sorts about the arch-villain we knew as Alpha (Samantha Morton), introduced as a dour killjoy among survivors aboard a riverboat which is trying to keep up appearances that civilization hasn’t entirely vanished. “There’s a time for caution and a time for joy,” Dee is told, but she isn’t buying it. The ferocious protector of her young daughter Lydia, Dee lives by the motto, “You’ve got to be strong or you won’t survive,” and all the Walking Dead fandom knows how that turned out.
My favorite to date airs September 4, featuring ER’s Anthony Edwards as an anthropological hermit studying and tagging “homo mortis” zombies. This dispassionate chronicler of nature at its most extreme is content to observe and never interfere — until he reluctantly comes to the rescue of the more optimistic Amy (Hacks‘ Poppy Liu). Can she help him regain his humanity? Won’t be easy for someone who lectures, “That’s the problem with Homo sapiens. All we do is take and take until there’s nothing left. And then once nature corrects the damage, we go back and do it all over again.”
And suddenly, the end of the world has become interesting again.
Tales of the Walking Dead, Series Premiere, Sunday, August 14, 9/8c, AMC (Two Episodes Stream on AMC+)
