Tales of the Walking Dead (2022) Review
Tales of the Walking Dead (2022) Review
Set in the months and years following the outbreak, the series follows the unique lives of new and familiar survivors, each facing the undead world in their own way. We follow doomsday prepper Joe (Crews) as he leaves his bunker on a quest to find his online friend and meets an unlikely ally in Evie (Munn) as they embark on a road trip that helps them find what they are really looking for. There is a tale of two hostile co-workers (Posey and Bell) who try to escape Atlanta – and each other – but find themselves in a time loop, reliving the hours before their deaths over and over again. And the origin story of The Walking Dead character Alpha (Morton) is revealed when we meet her as a mother trying to protect her child Lydia in a refuge.
Other stories involve a settler (Liu), who seeks to convince a scientist (Edwards), that humanity must reclaim the land from the dead; a man (Usher) who wakes with no memory and is accused of murder and a traumatised couple (Pineda and Ramirez) who take refuge in a secluded house where terror may already lurk inside.
This collection of stories features an acclaimed ensemble cast including Terry Crews (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Expendables), Olivia Munn (The Newsroom, X-Men: Apocalypse), Parker Posey (The White Lotus, Dazed and Confused), Anthony Edwards (ER, Top Gun), Jessie T. Usher (The Boys, Smile), Danny Ramirez (Top Gun: Maverick, Captain America: Brave New World), Daniella Pineda (Jurassic World: Dominion), Jillian Bell (Workaholics, 22 Jump Street), Poppy Liu (Hacks) and Samantha Morton (The Serpent Queen, The Walking Dead), who each offer a different perspective into the apocalypse, capturing not just the monsters that roam the earth, but the ones that live within us.
Regular visitors to my site may be aware that I am not a fan of THE WALKING DEAD and its never-ending spin-off TV series. I find them lazy, generic, and offering little that would satiate a zombie/undead fan but instead much in the way of pedestrian interpersonal drama. TALES OF THE WALKING DEAD, yet another spin-off, bucks that trend. Admittedly it is still concerned with providing soap drama wrapped up in a zombie apocalyptic setting, but it also offers up individual tales involving different characters rather than the mainstays from the original series. It makes for a refreshing and very welcome anecdote to the otherwise anaemic and inexplicably popular norm.
There is more thought and more imagination at play here, there is one tale that takes the GROUNDHOUND DOG route of having the same scenario play out repeatedly and then there is a standout episode set aboard a riverboat overtaken by mutinous crew that stars the wonderful Samantha Morton returning to her role of Alpha (aka Dee). Overall, TALES OF THE WALKING DEAD still proves to be a mixed bag. Frontloaded with the better episodes and finishing with the two weakest this is by no means perfect, but it is infinitely more appealing that the self-important output that THE WALKING DEAD universe has vomited up for mass consumption to date.
