How would you make this show good?

I think most Walking Dead fans can agree that FTWD isn't living up to its potential for many reasons, but what would you change to make a more compelling show?

I would have liked to have the main character start off as someone who was a bad apple even before the apocalypse, like maybe a gang member who had already killed someone. Perhaps this was a troubled urban youth peer-pressured into gang violence, and conflicted about it (a bit like American History X). Someone who is involved with some dangerous lowlife opportunistic people but also who would have a struggling family that they care about.

Also, the "slow burn" approach should have been much slower and more chaotic. There should have been a significant, sudden, and terrifying zombie outbreak in one or more major cities shown within the first few minutes of the show (which would have been dealt with promptly), and then the media/societal/political/religious fallout of that could have been explored for at least a season.

The absolute urban chaos that would result from the fear of this sort of pandemic would be amazing to explore: religious leaders proclaiming judgement day, mass suicides, looting, fake "cures" peddled on the streets, misinformation.

There'd be a little while where law and order starts to break down, but people still think that "the system" will remain intact enough to justify sprees of robberies, necessitate doomed evacuation and refugee camps, and generally result in the tragic deaths of everyone who's trying to keep it together (all the police, firefighters, rescue workers, humanitarians, etc).

You'd also have people breaking and entering, raping and murdering, and entire class uprising to the level of lower classes invading and taking over the upscale communities and mansions.

Each of these things could have been an entire episode. By the end of the first season, the TV's all go to static.

>How would you make this show good?
I'd get rid of the zombies and the main cast. It's now a show about puppies.

This. Plus more army v zombies but they would never show that becasuse the military would BTFO of the zombies fast.

cont

By the start of the second season, maybe our main character, some of his gangbanger cohorts, and a few of their family members would have started up a Mad Max sort of motorcade of thugs. Maybe their main vehicle would be a garbage truck or some other big powerful vehicle.

The interesting drama would result in our main character transforming from a low-life asshole into a heroic figure, as his friends and family die off or are murdered in this ruthless world.

We need main characters that are equipped to deal with the apocalypse right from the start, due to some character traits or training that would make sense.

it's pretty good desu, strand and nick are based.

amc doesnt want to spend the money to make an interesting show. its just a drama with zombies to mix it up. i doubt it'll get past season 3

Add one couple, just one couple in the entire show that isnt white female and minority male

honestly where the show failed was the inclusion of the army element; this turned out to be a cheap cop-out that abruptly ended the promise of "slow-burn" descent into apocalypse and made the army guys look like a bunch of stupid drones following some doomed government plan. That was just lazy writing.

In real life (and this would make FAR better drama), the army, the police, the firefighters, and just regular average people, would be going out of their way to help others, provide food and shelter, and risk their lives to save total strangers, at least in the early weeks of the apocalypse. This would be the great tragedy of FTWD; all the good people died off trying to do the right thing in the face of overwhelming odds.

Instead, the show takes the pessimistic, kill-or-be-killed approach RIGHT FROM THE START, when in the TWD our heroes needed several seasons to become the pragmatic hardened killers we now have. It's like the characters in FTWD read the fucking script in advance, and already have the mindset of "in the apocalypse, PEOPLE are the worst threat" right from the earliest signs of trouble.

What'd be great is our rampaging band of gang-banger marauders has to learn humanity and empathy, putting aside racial, class, and cultural differences to pull together in the end times.

It'd also be great if some sort of misguided religious cult leader become a central villain, and who would then be killed off by the main character who himself would start up a misguided new "religion" for survival. Just imagine some thug starting a cult where they brand a glyph on your chest with a hot iron or some shit. Mad Max-style foolishness out in the California sun.

Im a fan of all of this stuff, but its so frustrating to see such wasted potential by uncreative hacks

Kill the blonde milf and her hubby ( both are boring) the series will be much better

so far the best character has been Nick

>People in positions of authority going out of their way to help others in a crisis

Wew lad. Argentina's economic collapse, the entirety of the Horn of Africa, and the Balkan Wars want a word with you.

Sure there's going to be some good people. However, most people are going to fall into:

A) Personal opportunists
B) Familial isolationists

Seeing as the actual bad guys are the best suited for managing a crisis situation, a lot of group a falls in line under bad people to keep safe and stable, relatively speaking.

I'm pretty sure Daniel is a pretty questionable man OP. Someone with experience in torture and interrogation during a civil war sounds like a much worse Apple than a gang member.

Also, a million times more based. The creators also hint to Madison having a sketchy past also.

Strand's out as a candidate now that we know he's just a gay realtor.

Alicia sex scene every episode
also kill chris

but we're talking about a show situated in the Los Angeles area. I'm from this place, and while there are tons of shitty people, for the most part there'd be regular folks rushing into danger to help those in need, up until a certain point (probably a few weeks) where it becomes clear that it's no longer safe to do so and that society has totally collapsed.

The confusion would be from a general sense of extreme panic, misinformation, and mob mentality. They could have gone with the unsettling Paul Verhoeven/Robocop approach of sprinkling in tidbits of how the world is doing on the TV; here and there you'd hear about how Tokyo has been devastated, or Paris successfully evacuated, you'd have numerous alerts on the public broadcast system, and then probably nutjobs commandeering the TV/radio stations and preaching about the end of the world or telling people to gather at some questionable safe haven.

What'd be amazing is to have the TV's go static, then re-appear with only 1 station that constantly broadcasts some religious cult leader preaching madness. Then, in season 2, you actually meet this guy and enter his world where he's sanctioned off a safe area and is training fighters.

Yeah it would be a lot of this bullshit but it wouldn't be in the retarded kill on sight fashion it happened in the show.

They had a scene where a cop stocked up his car with water in S1, i wish they'd have kept up with that. Society would collapse because the people working in rescue services would be the first ones to go. Hospital staff would be too scared to show up to work out of fear for infecting themselves and their families. So during the chaos they'd run off.

The bad guy approach of looting and shooting would only work for a short time during the initial chaos, then others would band together because they're fed up with their shit and make an example of them. We'd get down to neighborhoods setting up militias, organizing communities. There'd be enough ex cops and soldiers as well as the civilians out there to put a stop to gangs of thug if it came down to it.

It would be a lot more gradual than it was in the show, and that would have been really interesting to see. But the writers suck so yeah.

Does anyone else think nick had prison sex with strand? I mean it's obvious now why strand took such a strong liking to him.

True, Daniel is a much "worse apple" and is pretty well-equipped to deal with the apocalpyse, but i've always that there could have been a more "close to home" relatable character such as a run of the mill gang member.

It just seems like Daniel character and the military guy he captured/tortured were shoehorned into the story to provide the painfully on-the-nose examples of pragmatic, unethical survivalism that the show really doesn't need until several seasons out.

The main thing is that the character are WAY too wise about the whole state of the world when in reality they'd be shitting their pants with fear and confusion.

A good example of this is the asian airplane lady (Alex?). At the point where we find her floating in the raft with burned-face kid, she knows just one thing: there's a strange infection that turns people into monsters. The plane people had no way to gauge the state of the nation/world, how far society has fallen, etc.

But as soon as she's floating on the raft with the other crash survivors, she's ready to commit several counts of murder to protect the kid, because "in this world humans are the biggest threat".

totally this. you get it.

would would be great, and bold of them to do would be to include a little side-cast of characters (Alicia, Ofelia, Chris) and have them be holed up in a mansion or some shit, protected by a neighborhood-turned-militia, and then a band of thugs breaks in and takes the place over.

You'd have a bunch of criminals who just want some pussy, and start raping the girls, then they'd just execute the whole family in a quick sequence. It'd be shocking. The thug ringleader would give some little speech about "who's gonna stop us now?" and then casually stroll outside covered in blood and howl like a wolf at the night sky. And just like that, our little Alecia/Ofelia/Chris crew is gone.

Maybe gangbanger guy takes out the rapist hooligans, but it'd be an example of everything going to pure shit based on believable human motivations.

Think about it - at some point people are gonna realize you won't get arrested for shit anymore.

Minority male + white male,
Minority male + minority female
The ranger station family was 100% white

I was surprised at how quick that they killed off drydock dude and his crew
I thought that he was being set up as this seasons villain but apparently not
And they dropped that big boat from episode 2
And the guy that the daughter was with too
At least next episode looks kinda interesting

I think the big villain this season will be the border crossing, also pretty sure Alicia was only with that guy because she thought she could use him to save her family/escape

ALSO raft girl is still obsessed and still alive so she might come after them

>I think the big villain this season will be the border crossing
I haven't gotten how they need money to cross the border honestly
Wouldn't the border have collapsed?
Why cant they just cross in a different spot?
Why do they need money?
It makes little sense

>also pretty sure Alicia was only with that guy because she thought she could use him to save her family/escape
Yeah i got that part but they dumped him real quick
He was there for 2 episodes (3 if you count him on the radio) and he got turned over into helping her so quickly i thought that i had missed an episode honestly
And then they just leave him on a boat out in the middle of nowhere
Like have a shot of some walkers coming through a door behind him or something jesus
The potential her, strand and dennis have are a pretty big reason im still following the show
I really hope she comes back wanting revenge but she seemed as if she dropped that when she talked to travis

Everything is happening too fast, it's like everyone has already started becoming raider-like shitheads and it's only been a matter of weeks or it appears so,
I wish it spend more time world building maybe, though it could be boring I guess.

What if.. they are the big villains.
I mean what if they become the villains?

Characters are likable non-self-righteous asshole diversity quotas

>middle class family from suburban LA becoming villains
That would be cool but they'd fuck even that up
This whole show is moving so fast honestly, i wouldn't be surprised if they were eating human flesh 3 episodes from now

They don't know if the border collapsed or not, I think when they get there it will be a massive cluster fuck, that's why the crossing itself will be the villain, not any specific person.

Also re: Alicia guy getting dumped, his dick was hungry, that's why he was so eager to help Alicia. Now that he's been dumped expect him to show up on team raft lady coming for revenge if they keep her in the show. Raft lady will come back as an antagonist but will probably turn good along with Alicia's puppy dog in a few episodes (probably during the border related shitshow)

>They don't know if the border collapsed or not, I think when they get there it will be a massive cluster fuck, that's why the crossing itself will be the villain, not any specific person.
I think youre right in some aspects here
The border will be a cluster fuck of walkers most likely, with the state of that tent city last episode im not holding out any people still on land
>not any specific person.
Now we saw from next eps teaser that there was a firefight going on, this will most likely be the people theyre meeting to cross shooting walkers but the way dennis picks up that ring leads me to think that the people theyre paying may be the people he ran with in el salvador, most likely a cartel because your average hollywood writer has no idea about south america in the cold war
This also brings up other points of why theyre paying people for them to cross a border in a societal collapse when they're on a boat, so they might be going onto land OR the people they're paying could be the owners of the huge ass boat with the .50 in EP 2

>Strand is just a gay realtor

Haven't watched the last 2 or 3 episodes, because obvious reasons. But are you for fucking real?

It showed flashbacks, he was kissing a Mexican guy.

Is Strand the top or bottom?

i think the same,,, they kill to everyone in that militar hospital only to rescue one of them

>different news stations like CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, ABC, jumping to different correspondents around the world reporting in on the various states of global collapse
>reporter on Wall Street losing his mind as the NYSE collapses into nothing
>nutjobs commandeering the TV/radio stations to preach all sorts of religious end of the world dogma, go on insane tinfoil tier conspiracy theorist rants, people who've simply snapped and start executing live studio audiences held hostage, on live tv
>soldiers burst in to kill the cooky conspiracy tinfoilers
>after the tv goes static eventually it comes back but all channels are the same broadcast of a religious cult leader

my dick is fucking rock hard right now, absolute insanity going down on the TV is one of my fetishes. Another one is Doomsayers in the street ringing bells, wearing "THE END IS NIGH" sandwich boards screaming about how doomed everyone is

>I think most Walking Dead fans can agree that FTWD isn't living up to its potential

It's better than TWD, tbphwyf

The show fucked up by taking things way too fast. There was so much wasted potential with the time period season 1 covered. I wanted to see the gradual collapse of society with military and emergency services being more succesful at stemming the tide at first. They rushed to what basically is the walking dead 2.0 now. Im considering dropping the series after that abysmal last episode.

the whole paying to cross the border makes no sense at all and is just a plot contrivance.

also why is asian raft lady so pissed off at TRAVIS (when it was Strand that cut the rope) that she was willing to give them up to obvious pirate bad guys?

The dialogue and motivations of both raft lady and that tied up to chair bad guy were just silly.

honestly this show disappoints me every episode, yet i still watch

Also, is the asian girl supposed to be a sympathetic character? Didnt see the web series, but she comes off as a right cunt by killing that one dude on her raft and with it being implied she killed the second one as well. And for what? To protect some fucker who was dead meat anyway?

>They had a scene where a cop stocked up his car with water in S1

I wish that guy was a main character, if only we followed him for an episode or two. That guy fucking knew some shit was in the air and gtfo of Dodge. That was probably my favorite scene in the first few episodes.

>on patrol late one night with your partnerbro
>get a call about some whacky crackheads in a back alley or some flophouse
>arrive on scene
>all sorts of grizzly shit in the alley
>bum comes shuffling at you
>partner tries to call to the man
>eats him
>you dump rounds into the bum and he keeps coming
>more are coming
>your half eaten partner gets up and starts at you
>gtfo and tell central what you just saw
>stop at the gas station to stock up on water
>blow town

that cop definitely saw/knew some shit

And yeah I believe absenteeism would be crippling

She's into little boys

i genuinely cant tell what we're supposed to be thinking or feeling about the asian lady, or what her motivations are. it's shitty writing.

i also thought that she'd be a means-well protagonist, but now she's a raider or whatever.

the most obvious flaw though is that, for her, all of this shit JUST STARTED and she knows almost nothing about what is going on in the big picture. It's implied that on the plane she had some limited knowledge that there's a zombie virus, but that's it.

She, and everyone else who survived the plane crash, has NO WAY of knowing that the country/world has fallen into such chaos that it would be a reasonable choice to murder other raft survivors without fear of legal consequence.

i also can't tell who the fuck is the main character, but i'm pretty sure it's either Travis, Madison, or Nick.

The problem is, only Nick has enough of a "characterization" to make him an interesting lead in a zombie apocalypse comic-book story. For instance, Rick's a sheriff, Darryl's a redneck, Merle was a criminal.

Nick is a druggie, he's got a little edge and street-sense to him. Madison and Travis however are just mundane average people. You'd need to give them an angle to make them remotely interesting (like maybe travis loses his hand, or madison starts whoring herself and her daughter out to gain leverage, etc)

I get the sense that these writers are a bunch of no-talent hacks who schmoozed their way into much more responsibility than they deserve.

I dont understand the timeline here. She was 'rescued' by strand and the gang, cut loose and then becomes a raider immediately after? How much time has passed since she was abandoned by the abigail. And wtf did the abigail do in the meantime.

Here's where I'm confused

>Nick sees the plane listing severely in season 1 sometime after the NG occupation i think?
>a week or two passes?
>they come across the plane crash

Am I the only one who thinks that's a bit convoluted and unlikely? I mean the kid who finds that dying guy on the wreckage, how long could that guy have been sitting there, without actually dying? And the bitch was originally at sea, but they came across her when they were ashore and she was running from zombies? Maybe I'm not paying attention enough because its rubbish, but what is the timeline there?

it's implied that she was rescued by the pirates (Connor's crew) and then immediately told them about the abigail because she was angry at TRAVIS for allowing the situation to transpire how it did.

Ignore the fact that she had up until that point appeared to be a highly ethical character invested in protecting the innocent (burned-face kid) and would totally not join up with obvious bad guys or endanger the lives of several innocent teens just to "get back at" some poor guy who didn't have much of a choice.

I mean its amazing how retarded this shit is. Then they hit us with the idiotic "people are the greatest threat" monologues.

apparently she remained by the crashed plane (probably anchored the raft somewhere and stayed on the raft most of the time) and periodically returned to the wreckage area to scavenge stuff.

>I would have liked to have the main character start off as someone who was a bad apple even before the apocalypse, like maybe a gang member who had already killed someone. Perhaps this was a troubled urban youth peer-pressured into gang violence, and conflicted about it (a bit like American History X). Someone who is involved with some dangerous lowlife opportunistic people but also who would have a struggling family that they care about.

this is pretty close to Nick
a junkie who has to kill his dealer/ex-bestie in self defense because the dealer thought he was snitchin'
yeah, a zombie or two had been shown but nobody knew yet

Yeah it's a mess, but I too have to admit im not full focused when watching it. It's not interesting enough for that, but I dont think I missed any major plot points.

But didnt the abigail go south after dumping her? How the fuck did the she hook up with the raiders who then managed to board the abigail afterwards. Did I miss something?

I like it. Nick and Strand and wtf Rueben Blades is named are the most well equipped to survive the new world, maybe Madison but the rest will be dead soon. Except Alicia is masturbation material so they will string her retarded character along despite how dumb she is. I like how they are on the sea now dealing with pirates, keeps it different than main show but I hope to see more differences in how Mexico is dealing with the outbreak

>uncreative hacks
>dude it should be like Mad Max!

what are you even doing, kiddo?

So did the plane crash on land or at see? The last episode I watched was the episode when they come across the wreckage. And it seems there was a pretty even split, like the plane crashed at both land and sea. Or like it broke up before impact.

He looked more like Rick perry than a Mexican, Louise is Mexican as fuck though.

>she kills two people for attempting to mess with this kid
>user thinks she wouldn't turn around and try to kill people who contributed to his actual death

She's not being highly moral user, she's invested in the kids existence because she's a human being. She protects him and gets mad at people who try to or actually do kill him, it's perfectly consistent.

i have no idea about those details, lol. also barely keeping interest in the shit.

another thing that bothers me is the Abigail itself; i can't believe the writers didn't realize the placing our heroes onto that nice of a boat would seriously damage the potential drama.

I mean that boat is a high-end yacht and looks like it has fucking life-support systems. You may as well give our heroes biohazard suits, night-vision goggles, and motion-tracking sensors and other gadgets at that point.

Part of the fun of TWD is that our main characters had to scrape by with a revolver, a crossbow, a rifle, and an RV.

FTWD should have put our crew onto a medium sized fishing boat that you'd find at any harbor, and then have them struggle like shit out at sea.

>mfw fear the walking dead and walking dead merge.
>Nick ends up being leader of The Whisperers...

The show is pretty much already beyond saving. They kept advertising it as "Watch Los Angeles fall!" then they just fast forwarded a week completely skipping all of LA turning.

dude there's probably lots of groups all across north america that independently figured out the whisperer "zombie disguise" technique.

>also why is asian raft lady so pissed off at TRAVIS (when it was Strand that cut the rope)

maybe she didn't see too good

>that tied up to chair bad guy
you mean Jesse McCartney? kek

totally this. By episode 3 or 4 i knew they had fucked it up beyond repair.

Imagine how cool it would have been to see a bunch of average folks taking charge after the military and society collapses. Pretty much your average crowd at a Dodgers game turned into a well-intentioned militia driving around Humvee's and shit. That type of everyman's order would fall apart so quickly

dude's acting was atrocious in those scenes, hole-e-shit.

well they're in SoCal, it's a different place than the Rust Belt

>having to explain EVERYTHING to Sup Forums autists
>mfw

Strand cut the rope but travis' weakness despite him clearly being uncomfortable with it is what caused her to be left in the raft in the first place. She's not mad at strand because strand was always against her, she's mad at Travis because Travis went against her even though he knew better

the walking dead west coast edition