Vidiots

 My wife and I are big fans of The Walking Dead. The AMC series about the survivors of a virus that reanimates corpses. The one that seems to have a life beyond the grave. The last shuffling zombie was to have crept across our screen back in November of 2022. And yet, somehow, the walkers keep on walking. Six different spinoff series have been spawned out of the carcass of the tale that began once upon a time with a sheriff's deputy that woke up from a coma to discover that the world he knew had become a hellscape where things had gone from bad (coma) to worse (flesh-eating monsters roam the streets). Way back in 2010, this seemed like a worthwhile diversion for my bride and me as we searched for a "new show."

A very long time ago, before she was a wife, she and I were avid viewers of Moonlighting. If you don't have that show on the tip of your memory spear, that's understandable since it hasn't made much of a splash on any of your standard streaming services. Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis, before he was king of the action movies, ran a detective agency. They solved mysteries and perpetuated another one with their audience: When will those two, well, you know. And if you don't know, you probably weren't there. But my wife and I were. Much in the same way that we were there for Pee Wee's Playhouse. Every episode. Avid viewers, she and I. First run and reruns. 

What I am suggesting here is that the two of us have a history when it comes to "our shows." For a good long while when we first got together, sharing an apartment and a television, we were stuck on ER. We watched that one through more shift changes than your average Denny's. Doctors Greene and Ross were replaced by equally earnest individuals with medical degrees aided by nurses who were every bit as fraught with the pains of being good looking and working in an inner city hospital. That was a decade and a half. 

This was a time that network television could promote as "must-see TV." Which is probably how we began to forge such a fierce dependence on a weekly appointment with our couch and the appliance across the room. We have been staring at something for most of our married lives. But this zombie thing may have run its course. We found ourselves questioning whether this was a good decision, not us, but the characters on the screen. Why do they continue to put themselves in danger, and why do we keep watching like it would reach some sort of logical conclusion? The dead just keep walking. 

I am saying that we may have to leave before the end credits. We might even end up talking to one another. About something other than zombies.