It has been 2 years since the last time I wrote about my hate-watching habit and try as I might I still can’t seem to get this monkey off my back. Sure most of the shows I was hate-watching have mercifully gone to the TV show graveyard in the sky yet other shows have popped up to fill that hole in my soul that only a good hate-watch can satisfy.

FEAR THE WALKING DEAD

My realization that I still have a hate-watch habit came about with the feeling that I felt when I realized that FEAR THE WALKING DEAD was coming back and I was eagerly anticipating watching it but not because I like the characters, think the writing is great or even because I will watch anything with zombies in it. Nope, I was hyped up for the return of FEAR THE WALKING DEAD because I get a bizarre thrill watching a show that is full of characters I hate, doing things that make no sense, with writing that is mediocre at best. Its like living an episode of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 every Sunday night as I make wisecracks at the stupidity of the show and wish every week to see any of these characters die. It is the total opposite of how I watch THE WALKING DEAD. I actually worry about my favorite characters biting the dust on TWD but on FTWD I eagerly anticipate the body count growing and am disappointed every week that a main cast member avoids death. The only character in the entire FTWD universe I can even tolerate is the zaftig zombie hunter Tobias and he hasn’t been seen since early on in Season 1.
It’s not even like I went into FTWD looking to hate it either. I was really excited to see the onset of the zombie apocalypse and how civilization fell but FTWD isn’t even about that. The show paid lip service to its stated synopsis for about 2 episodes before turning into THE WALKING DEAD: WEST COAST and we were hip deep into the zombie apocalypse with people behaving in ways that were totally incongruent with a zombie outbreak that had only been in effect for a couple of weeks. Its like the folks working on the show knew that they didn’t have the requisite talent or creativity to pull of what the show was pitched as so they just fell back into the familiar territory of a group of people looking for a safe place to live out their days in a world full of zombies. It was a bad idea because they took the one interesting thing about the show and jettisoned it so that it became a pale copy of it’s sister show only with less engaging characters.