sracer

There is nothing "healthy" about whining incessantly week after week about poor writing. Is such a person strapped to a chair forced to watch the show week after week (like a scene out of Clockwork Orange)? Is that person a masochist that they willingly subject themselves to things that they don't like or find any value in?

This is not about "healthy debate"... it is about a mental disorder that causes someone to voluntarily inflict an unpleasant experience on themselves and then complain to others about it.

TimeandTide

I agree.

I watched every episode of Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles because despite the truly terrible writing at times and a handful of completely ridiculous performances (Shirley Manson for starters), I LOVE the Terminator universe, enjoyed Green's and Glau's roles, and got a major kick out of the feature-film quality visuals. Plus, the final ep. of season one is one of my all-time top TV viewing experiences. Great stuff. But as a whole the show pretty much sucked and there was far more to complain about than praise.

Having a similar exp. with Walking Dead. Love the genre, enjoyed the comics, and digging the show's look. The acting and writing are quite awful, however. BUT, it's still Must See viewing for me. Has a ton of potential and I'll stick with it for a couple seasons at least in hopes it finds its footing. (The first couple eps of Nikita were pretty bad, but it's shaping up to be my favorite show on TV right now.)

PopcornTreeCt

I would never watch a show if I thought it had bad writing. I watch too much TV as it is. Especially on Sundays.

Trevor

Are you trying to out-Lemmy Lemmy?

"Whining incessantly week after week"?! First off, I have never whined. I have politely voiced legitimate complaints about a promising but very flawed new show. Secondly, it's been two weeks! What do you do? Give up on a show if the first episode is not good enough? Walk out of a film if the first 5 minutes is bad? Extreme example I admit, but did you even read what you wrote? Two weeks! I'll give you that an entire season of nothing but complaints would be silly (I'll stop short of calling it a mental disorder ), but people usually give shows a couple/few weeks, and have every right to complain if they want.

I have repeatedly praised the good parts of the show and admitted being hopeful that it improves.

Navinabob

Data from a few years back:

People who love Howard Stern's radio show listened to it 4.5 hours a week. People who hated the show listened to it 7 hours a week.

People are strange.

ThomasB

(mild spoilers) After watching "Guts", I think my take on the series is that it arranges a lot of elements that have worked in other zombie stories/plots but then fails to generate any investment in the characters. I know that the series is being criticized as lacking originality, and I certainly agree with that criticism. However, I think what prevents me from enjoying the show is how arbitrary the scripts have been.

If I could isolate a single scene that illustrates this, I think it would be the guts scene itself. As a plot point, there should be a lot of dramatic tension around the negotiation of what to do with the body (and then how to apply the gore to their bodies). Yet in execution, the scene felt indifferent, even inconsequential. For comparison, a similar scene in Dead Set made much more of an impact and caused me as a viewer to care about the toll of the characters' actions and the effect such a turning point would have on them. If a satire like Dead Set can have that kind of emotional impact, then The Walking Dead should certainly be able to reach at least that basic standard.

Troy Stiffler

Hey, go look at the SNL threads. There's always people who chime in to tell us that SNL hasn't been funny since 1979.

The Office and Family Guy are like this, too.

belboz

The grainy look has to be intentional. 16mm film does not get that grainy unless you push it. It might be valid to question the DP's choice in doing so in an era of digital distribution and the prevalence of low bit rate encoding, but I'm sure he likes what he sees in edit suite.

Also I'm not as familiar with cable company operations, but my assumption has always been that for the digital channels, the dvr just records the digital bitstream. That is, the dvr displays and plays back the exact same picture that non-dvr subscribers are seeing. I'd guess that the fault for the poor encoding lies with the cable company because they don't allot enough bandwidth per channel to encode at a higher bitrate.

MBoyd

I remember when Super 16 was being sold as perfect for upcoming 16x9 HDTV back in the mid to late 90s. That said, I like grain . . . I bet it will look really nifty if they give us a B/W version on the Blu-ray.

Yavin

Just caught up with the first two episodes on demand and loving it so far. The "let's smear ourselves with zombie guts and walk by them undetected" scene reminded me of Shaun of the Dead. Looking forward to the next episode.

Shazam

Navinabob

It appears that episode 3 has almost nothing in-common with the comics from the preview. Sorta odd choice this early on but I'm along for the ride either way.

nodeerforamonth

NO! I can't stand that jerky "every other frame" thing that happens whenever there's fast motion when filmed digital.

nodeerforamonth

Yeah, what's all the complaints about the picture quality? Looked absolutely fine to me on my high def tv.

Are people watching bootlegs or downloaded versions of this? Probably best to just watch the real thing on tv.

VHS?

I'm watching live TV on my WD-60C9
How can grain in a picture look good ? It's like watching TV with rabbit ears
I actually did download last weeks episode (for comparison and educational purposes only) from HD capture and it looked far better. Fact I saw no grain whatsoever.
If people like the glittery look, thats fine. I just find it distracting. When I think HD, I picture a smooth, clear image like most HD I watch.