10 Ridiculous TV Premises Everybody Fell For

The zombie apocalypse is, fundamentally, all about survival. The Walking Dead is one of many zombie narratives that detail a world where a zombie outbreak has brought civilisation to its knees and the survivors (the real ‘walking dead’, naturally) must protect themselves from the dead and the living alike.

However, these bleak tales of post-apocalyptic horror never establish exactly how civilisation, government, and the rule of law are brought low by the zombie pandemic, and The Walking Dead is no exception. In fact, the genre is so well ingrained in pop culture now that barely anyone even bothers asking the question anymore: it’s just assumed that Zombies = Fall Of Man.

Despite the infrastructure of the country remaining intact and the traditionally slow-moving, clumsy nature of this variant of the undead, The Walking Dead sees the collapse of American civilisation take place in short order. Like other zombie narratives before it, it simply fast forwards to the good part and glosses over how implausible it is that local and central government, police and armed forces, communications and power would all vanish overnight because of an infection spread by a few lurching, mindless corpses.

Were humanity to band together to fight the zombie apocalypse in the same way that they always do to fight alien invasions, there would be no zombie apocalypse. That’s what happens at the end of Shaun Of The Dead, after all - the army turn up, shoot them all in the head and life returns to normal, which is exactly what would happen in real life.

Walking Dead prequel series Fear The Walking Dead purported to fill in the blanks and show the fall of civilisation, but skips over all the big stuff, therefore defeating the whole premise of the show. In an extension of that Hollywood trope where crashing cars explode for no reason, suddenly the city is simply on fire.