TAG TEAM REVIEW: THE WALKING DEAD #2

1. I thought that Episode 1 was a little too quiet. Episode 2 needed some more quiet. Between the two, there is a balance, I suppose, but too early to see if they can make a McDLT out of it (am I showing my age..?).

Also, the cliched moments (looking for gas... the zombie girl... the father and son without a mother... the having to venture out to bring back the truck) are hard to endure, but I'm hoping that they stop with the tropes once the series gets rolling.

2. There's a nip-slip in the Michael Rooker picture in the article. Noice!

Everybody's entitled to their opinion, and let's face it, a critic's job is to criticize. This is why I'm not a critic.
Way I see it, we have a quality horror-drama on TV, with a good cast, a top-notch filmmaker at the helm and KNB bringing their A-game. On top of that, it's made the overused zombie scary again and that ain't easy after ZOMBIELAND. I would call this a "win". This was a tense hour of television that kicked the bejeezus out of anything that passes for horror on the big screen, and I delighted in every minute of it. As for any quibbles with plot and character, they're so minor to me that it didn't affect my overall enjoyment of it.
The Louis CK analogy is apropos. Go back ten years - hell, last year - and there was nothing on TV like this. And yet, we have dissatisfaction after one episode. The graphic violence, the attempt at creating sympathetic characters and treating the material with reverence - all signs that there's, at the very least, an attempt to create great television. It may not be perfect, but it's sure as hell trying. And I'll take honest, if flawed, effort over lowest-common denominator laziness any day of the week.
Again, to each their own, but I think it's WAY too soon to start getting sour, folks. It's two episodes in - give it some time to find its tone before we throw the baby out with the bathwater.
As a sidenote, the Kirkman-bashing seems a little overplayed now. It doesn't even seem contextual anymore to the reviews anymore, it's just fanboy snark. The series is its own beast and can easily be reviewed as such.