As the debut of the second season of AMC’s The Walking Dead on Sunday, October 16th draws near, reviews of the first two episodes of the season (including the 90-minute Season 2 debut) are beginning to appear. In Variety, Brian Lawry made note of the turmoil surrounding the production of the second season of the adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s long-running zombie saga from Image Comics (see “Trouble Ahead for The Walking Dead?”), but doesn’t think that it is discernable in the final product, concluding: “The behind-the-scenes tumult surrounding The Walking Dead and departure of showrunner Frank Darabont certainly isn’t evident from the first two episodes, including a 90-minute premiere that niftily reestablishes the premise and the characters while containing one sequence that is a modern gem of prolonged suspense.”
In his review Lawry characterizes the series as “a post-apocalyptic soap opera, in essence, with enough of an ‘ick’ factor to attract men,” and predicts that “the ratings will also provide AMC with an early Christmas present.” Good ratings would be a boon for pop culture retailers since ICv2 has determined that The Walking Dead TV series is currently the #1 media sales driver of graphic novels in both the comic shop and bookstore markets, and two board games based on the property are due out this fall.
In other The Walking Dead news, The New York Times reports in a very humorous piece how the producers of the show managed to deflect the advertising minions at Microsoft who wanted to inject a product placement for the software giant’s “Bing” search engine into The Walking Dead. When the producers explained that there was no reliable electric power in the post-apocalyptic world of The Walking Dead, the ad men came back with the idea of a library with its own generator, which the producers thankfully shot down. Microsoft’s agency quickly moved in a more sensible direction and produced a clever ad featuring two actors in full zombie drag (provided by the makeup wizards from the series) that is currently running on AMC and will be aired primarily during episodes of The Walking Dead.
In yet another indication of the show’s popularity, Netflix, which is constantly looking for more material to add to its video streaming array, announced a deal that will allow the video distributor to add the first season episodes to its streaming service right away. Future series of The Walking Dead will be available for streaming via Netflix just prior to the airing of the following season, which means that Second Season episodes will be available to Netflix consumers in 2012 shortly before the Third Season episodes begin to air on AMC.
