I like dystopian sci-fi when it's well done, as plausible as possible, and has something intelligent to say. And there's been lots of good stuff to choose from esp. in film and novels in the past decade.
And well done horror is okay to me, but I get nothing out of splatter.
TWD is heavily melodrama, and not very inspired or well written melodrama at that. Their moral issues boil down to "how ruthless, brutal and murderous can we, Rick's gang, be and still retain our humanity?" and "have our survival choices made us as bad as the bad-guys-of-the-season we're fighting?"... these being questions often found in Westerns and war movies. If TWD did something smart with these old tropes, great, but they don't, they just go around and around with them season after season.
This tediousness they break up with bursts of intense violence. The type I hate is the extreme cruelty and sometimes outright sadism characters inflict on each other. The brutal human-on-human violence is a cheap, sensationalistic, and unimaginative way to increase the stakes or heighten the drama, but it's frequently pretty repulsive. Because it's one sentient human inflicting their cruelty on another, it's nastier and more repulsive than the human-zombie violence. Zombie violence being the other source of action... gore... they use to break up the weakness of their repetitive, endless "moral dilemma" melodramas.
A year or so ago a NYT reviewer on TWD's new season at the time said, paraphrasing, such a big show, too bad it has nothing to say. From among my several complaints, that's my biggest. It's been a missed opportunity to do something exceptional in front of a big viewing audience. I hadn't read anywhere that Andrew Lincoln, "Rick," the lead character, was tired of largely just wasting all those years on such a show, but if that is his main (if unspoken) reason for leaving TWD, it wouldn't surprise me. Some of those actors are talented, and big paycheck or not, I would think life's too short to stay in some roles but so long.
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