Today, I will be doing a spoiler-free review of season 1 of The Walking Dead. For those who don’t know, The Walking Dead is a show about a group of survivors who are desperate for a home and safety after a zombie apocalypse breaks out. During this show they also never refer to the creatures as zombies, but instead refer to them as “walkers”. Season 1 is only 6 episodes long, but I won’t be reviewing each episode but more like an overview of the entire season. This season truly isn’t one of my favorites of the show and I feel like there is much better, however it still is pretty good. The first episode is one of the best in the entire series, followed by 5 pretty good but not great episodes. The main characters in this season are Rick Grimes who is the main character of most of the show. Daryl Dixon is probably the second most known character in the show, but in this season he doesn’t play a major role until later on. Shane Walsh was Rick’s police partner before the apocalypse and plays a major role in this season. Lori and Carl are Rick’s wife and kid. There are also side characters that don’t do too much this season like Glenn, Andrea, Carol, and Dale.
The antagonist of this season is simply just the walkers. The show does a good job of making them really interesting and intimidating throughout the first season. Most of this season is just Rick trying to figure out what is going on and find his family. In the first episode he wakes up in the hospital about 2 months into the apocalypse and has no idea what’s going on. For the first episode you are introduced to a man named Morgan who plays a bigger role later on in the series. I thought the best parts of this season besides the characters, was the pacing, acting, and plot. It was simple and easy to follow but it flowed very easily and didn’t have many boring or uninteresting moments. The acting is also always some of the best parts of this entire show and there are some legendary scenes that are just carried by phenomenal acting. The action is solid but nothing insane as like I said this first season is very story-driven. Cinematography is pretty good but definitely has its bad moments with the smaller budget they had going in. The ending of this season was very good too with a good cliffhanger leaving you not knowing what the future holds for all of the characters.
I always rate shows I watch and I rate them based on 10 things in the show. Those things are: action, acting, cinematography, pacing, score, characters, ending, plot, protagonist, and antagonist. I rate all of those pieces 1-10 and then after that, I add up the scores of all 10 of them and get a total score out of 100. I gave this season a 87/100, and like I said it’s a very good season especially for only being six episodes and they fit a good amount of story into those episodes without it feeling very rushed. However, there are much better seasons still to come with this show.
