Tracking the Dead, Pt. 1

The Walking Dead represents the climax of a long-building cultural obsession with zombies that began in earnest over 40 years ago with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. The season two premiere on October 16, 2011 shattered the cable rating records in the 18-49 demographic with over 7.3 million households tuning in.

 If you been in hibernation from pop culture the past two years, this will give you a taste for the gory fare:

The Walking Dead enjoys a remarkably strong social media presence, and by no accident. The main reason I chose to track The Walking Dead is not because I'm a fanboy, far from it in fact (more on that later), but rather because, objectively speaking, their social media team is bar none. The Walking Dead's Facebook page boasts almost 6.5 million likes, with an impressive 755,000 "talking about about this." The mere reminder that the show's second episode (after a 2 1/2 month midseason break) airs tonight (2/19/12) garnered 14,000 likes, 1,000 comments and 700 shares as of 7 hours before airtime. Those stats alone are illustrative of an existing, robust dialog that needs almost no prompting.

2 days before first episode (2/10)

I had a fairly straightforward hypothesis that The Walking Dead's social media "stats" would pick up after the show itself picked up after its long midseason break. The numbers back this up. The first Social Mention (herafter SM) stats I took were from 2 days before the first episode on February 10.

Compare those to the SM stats from today, February 19, and you see notable increases in "strength," "reach" and especially "passion," which went up 12%.

The "sentiment" factor dropped slightly, but I quickly found you shouldn't put too much stock in this metric. It seems to be fooled easily, and can't, for example, tell the enormous difference in "this episode was a piece of shit" and "this episode was the shit!" You get a more accurate reading of what people think by browsing what people are actually saying and not taking SM at its word.

Today (2/19)

The most prominent trope is the continual debate over whether the 2nd season is as good as the 1st. A little context for the non-viewer is needed here: the pace of the first season was objectively quicker as the cast of protagonists search for answers and a safe haven in the infested metropolis of Atlanta. The group is constantly in motion, hopping from location to location, inevitably running into swarms of zombies readymade for gruesome, cinematically-inventive deaths. The 2nd season has much more deliberate pace and philosophical tone, as it maintains a constant setting at a comparatively peaceful rural farmhouse. The clashing sentiments posed in the two comments below essentially sum up the difference in opinion over this monumental change:





It's a debate I expect to rage until the pace picks up enough to satisfy those watching more for zombie dismemberment than so-called character or story development. You can tentatively put me in the former camp, but only because the The Walking Dead's attempts at character development has looked a lot more like lazy writing, plodding, wishy-washy direction and acting/dialog that is so laughable at times you'd swear they were going for the television equivalent of the Razzies.