Emily Nussbaum: AMC's "The Walking Dead" Review: The New Yorker At two hours, a zombie movie provides a bracing shot of nihilism. Zombies aren't so much monsters as they are math, after all - seething, surging, interchangeable integers. Some go fast, some slow. Some are funny, some scary. But if the premise stays pure no true happy ending is possible, and, before you've even had time to absorb that fact, everyone you loved will be dead or lost in grief forever. AMC's zombie show, "The Walking Dead," on the other hand, has been grinding on for forty-three hours, something I can attest to, because I watched every episode in less than two weeks. Binge-watching has become a popular way to enjoy television, but with a show as flawed as "The Walking Dead" it's a dangerous drug, all spike-and-crash, as gorgeous surges of critical hope are blown apart and revealed as wishful thinking. In this way, it's not all that different from an actual zombie apocalypse. The show is based on an acclaimed graphic novel by Robert Kirkman, and the adaptation has been marked by behind-the-scenes turmoil, with the network subbing in three showrunners (the film director Frank Darabont, Glen Mazzara, and now Scott Gimple), one after another. Despite this messy background, the show has become a prize property for AMC, a brash little brother to tout alongside "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad." Visually, "The Walking Dead" fits quite well into the AMC brand, whose development model is based on finding TV series that complement the movies in its vault. And the series is, from its potent pilot on, a lush impasto of mud and blood, perversely beautiful, once you get used to the crushed skulls and the guts pouring out of the abdomens. The special effects are topnotch, as is the makeup, and there's a repulsive grandeur to the show's repeated vistas of writhing reanimated corpses, whether they are closing in on a farmhouse, gnawing on their victims in a ditch, or frotting a prison fence in drooling derangement. The show's gore is unmatched: a baby gets tugged from a woman's belly during a suicidal C-section (if the baby had died, it would have reanimated and clawed its way out); intestines dangle like red-sauced linguine from a rotted zombie pulled out of a well. If a katana sword is wielded in the first act, a head will roll by the finale. These images are gross, but they're bold, and they're at one with the show's primal question: how much punishment can one soul, one body, one viewer take? A lot, apparently - "The Walking Dead" gets higher ratings than any other series on cable. The people love their zombies. Early on, that popularity was understandable. The initial premise, which is similar to that of the movie "28 Days Later," is that a sheriff, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), was in a coma when the apocalypse began. As he stumbles out of the hospital, he discovers that society has collapsed. Eventually, he hunts down his wife, Lori, and son, Carl, and his ex-partner, Shane, who is now sleeping with Lori. They were on a break! These four, plus other survivors, a mixture of rednecks and city slickers, begin to figure out how, or whether, to work together. This structure has much in common with pop epics such as "The Stand," "The Lord of the Rings," and "Lost" (and "Gilligan's Island," had things gone badly), in which diverse crews form mini-societies in the wake of trauma. But, in contrast to those narratives, "The Walking Dead" "s monster-infested rural Georgia is a no-hope zone. Although the team repeatedly meets people - a scientist at the Centers for Disease Control, a Christian farmer, a cult leader/mall manager - who hold out hope for a cure or the idea that there's some humanity left inside "the walkers," they're deluded. Suicide is a rational response in this context, and, early on, several characters consider it, and a few act on it. Dark, adult stuff, right? At first, perhaps. But by the second season any pretense of thoughtfulness crumbles, and promising themes of grief and morality give way to cornball monologues about leadership. The characters, never especially deep, take on a watery, deoxygenated artificiality, their motivations plugged in and out as the plot dictates. In Season 1, a brassy civil-rights lawyer, Andrea, is forced to shoot her beloved younger sister, Amy, in the head just as she becomes a zombie. It's a heartbreaking moment. The same is true of the slow-build revelation that a preteen girl, Sophia, for whom the group had searched for weeks, became a "walker" long ago. But how many times can your heart break? As the corpses pile up, and the living characters become increasingly incoherent, the deaths are just marks on a to-do list. When the character T-Dog - a black man in a mostly white cast, marginalized from the story, with lines like "Oh, hell no" - got killed, I was momentarily confused. He had so little screen time that I thought he'd been eaten episodes earlier. There's a sense in which certain of these failings may be as much a feature of the show as a bug. The more adult "The Walking Dead" is, after all, the harder it is to watch - and when a character loses a spouse or a child the viewer is poisoned by empathy, a pain that lingers from week to week. Thicken the viewer's skin and you turn that suffering into a punch line. In perhaps the worst example, the formerly interesting Andrea spent the third season behaving with such offensive stupidity (among other things, she shacked up with a cult leader nicknamed the Governor, even after she discovered his prized aquarium of zombie heads) that viewers cheered when she was tortured. She's not the only one who has suffered this sort of fate, mangled by the writers long before she was at any risk from zombies. No, bite him! He's the weaker actor!" is an actual thought I began to have. None of this might matter if the show had some scabrous philosophical perspective to offer or the mordant humor suggested by its most outrageous visuals. On occasion, it does wink at unsettling ideas, as when an ingénue shrugs off the death of her new boyfriend, numbed, like the viewer, by endless loss. Yet, for all its pulpy muscularity, the show is oddly prudish - sexually and morally prim and devoid of true anarchy. Rick and Shane (first character-assassinated, then killed) and Lori (same), and almost everyone they meet along the way, talk in earnest whispers, as if they were narrating televised golf. When a woman in the second season gets pregnant, her companions act as if this were good news instead of using their MacGyver skills to procure an abortion. So many actresses are near-identical brunet supermodels - including wife Lori, girlfriend Maggie, and nurse Lily in Season 4 - that I began to suspect there was a cloning subplot. Even the action sequences - which can be legitimately suspenseful and creative - go limp in the later seasons. By the third season's finale, a face-off with the smirky Governor and his followers, the plot had become so baldly illogical that it played as farce. The fourth season, with a new showrunner, Gimple, in charge, began with surprising vigor: there were bursts of witty dialogue and a sense that the writers were repairing frayed characterizations. Then the Governor returned, for another showdown, and the roof caved in. Prissy Rick is still the show's nominal "hero," but the only character left to root for is Daryl (Norman Reedus), a redneck with a crossbow. Daryl is your standard semi-reformed tough guy - complete with abusive-childhood and good-with-children modules - but Reedus is a charmer, and that's enough reason for him to live. There's also the magnetic Chad Coleman, as Tyreese, one of several new black characters. The show has resolved its racial issue the way "Boardwalk Empire" did: cast several black actors, not just one, including guys from "The Wire." Another standout, Carol (Melissa McBride), Sophia's mother, has transformed from meek abuse victim to something more complex, and Daryl and Carol should surely be sleeping together, given their chemistry. Instead, we're forced to endure young lovers, Glenn and Maggie, who are so boring that I am willing to eat them myself. Among other tragic outcomes of a zombie apocalypse, the least deserving people get laid. A likely response to this particular tantrum is the same one that used to be applied to TV criticism as a whole: Who cares? It's just a zombie story. But stories about monsters and violence and worldwide cataclysms are not only not intrinsically empty; for decades they've been the unacknowledged saviors of television - a rare repository for some of the medium's most daring explorations of politics and sexual identity. This was true of "The Twilight Zone," in the sixties; it was true of "The X-Files" and of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," in the nineties. Impolite experimentation with "junk genres" is what has pushed episodic television storytelling beyond the lazy literal and into the mythic and the primal. This is the pulp pulse beneath a series like NBC's mad melodrama "Scandal," which traffics shamelessly in operatic imagery of rape and torture. It's the force that drives the wave of ambitious modern horror series, such as NBC's painterly "Hannibal," the Canadian clone-thriller "Orphan Black," the marvellously poetic French zombie series "The Returned," and "American Horror Story," on FX, whose second season, titled "Asylum," grew into a thorny, audacious masterpiece. "The Walking Dead" might have been one of these shows, using a grotesque story to go deep, letting grief and repulsion rile and unsettle us. Instead, it stumbles forward, disguised as prestige TV but devoid of a soul. Give in, and it will eat your brain. ♦