The first episode of The Walking Dead may still be the show’s finest hour. Club. A single television episode can exemplify the spirit of its time.

A Very Special Episode presents The A. V. Club’s survey of TV at its most distinctive. How many TV dramas have had better first episodes than The Walking Dead’s? Most television series should come with a pre- affixed warning label: “The pilot’s a little rough, but stick with it, the show gets better.” (Or even: “You’ll have to grind through the first season, but it’s worth it.”) But The Walking Dead arrived fully formed on AMC, on Halloween night of 2. The premiere episode “Days Gone Bye” delivered 6. It was an immediate hit by the metrics that govern cable outlets, and in the years that followed, its audience would grow to rival and even outpace the major networks. It’s really only over the past year—since the controversial season six finale and season seven premiere—that the ratings have begun a pronounced decline.

Even given that, the 1. The Walking Dead averages lately remains pretty phenomenal. Throughout its seven years of existence, though, The Walking Dead has been unusually embattled for a show that’s so successful. Watch Isolation Dailymotion more. Based on writer Robert Kirkman’s Image Comics series, The Walking Dead was originally developed by The Shawshank Redemption writer- director Frank Darabont, who was responsible for that knockout pilot, and then continued on as showrunner through the six- episode first season and through the planning stages for the second season. Darabont was eventually fired, reportedly due to tussles with AMC over his bosses’ tight budgets and his own inexperience with managing a TV production. It probably didn’t help that critics compared much of the remainder of season one unfavorably to the debut. The Shield veteran Glen Mazzara took the reins until the end of season three, when he handed them over to Scott M.

Gimple, who’s been in charge ever since. Gimple oversaw what’s widely regarded as the drama’s creative peak—the bulk of seasons four and five—but he’s also presided over the slide into nihilistic brutality that’s prompted some longtime fans to bail. How different is The Walking Dead now from the one viewers first fell in love with? The cast is bigger, and the stakes are higher—from raw survival to the rebuilding of human society. But the basic storytelling approach of quiet creepiness and cruel shocks hasn’t changed much. It was evident even in the prologue to “Days Gone Bye,” where the protagonist Rick Grimes (played by Andrew Lincoln) is seen walking through the wreckage of a zombie apocalypse, where he finds a sad- looking little girl who turns out to be one of the undead.

In the opening minutes of the series, Rick has to shoot a kid through the head. That was The Walking Dead’s overture. After that opening jolt, “Days Gone Bye” flashes back to Rick’s past as a deputy sheriff in a small Georgia town, alongside his somewhat piggish best friend Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal). When Rick gets shot in the line of duty, he lapses into a coma, and wakes up to the devastation of the zombie plague.

Darabont—who wrote and directed the episode, following the basic plot of Kirkman’s comic—generates a lot of tension from the hero’s confusion at a world that looks a lot like the one he knew, only with several surreal twists. Stacks of corpses and abandoned military equipment litter the campus of the hospital where Rick had been unconscious. Then there are the dead bodies that aren’t lying on the ground, but shambling through the streets, looking for living humans to munch on. The heart of “Days Gone Bye” is in a long sequence where the still- wounded Rick is taken in and nursed back to health by Morgan Jones (Lennie James) and his son Duane, who fill Rick in on what happened while he was in the hospital, and explain how to handle these “walkers.” A good chunk of this episode is dialogue free, relying mainly on shots of the hero slowly making his way through a living nightmare. But the scenes with Morgan and Duane are calmer and more civil, and express some hope that humanity can endure.

This has become the central tension of the series—that humans need to become stronger and more calloused to survive, but if they do so at the expense of any kind of moral social order, there’s not much that separates them from the flesh- eaters.“Days Gone Bye” has a vivid look, thanks in large part to grainy 1. And Darabont builds the story masterfully, from the little digressions and conversations—which includes a brief trip to an encampment outside Atlanta where we learn that Shane is still alive, and that he’s taking care of Rick’s wife and son—to the way the scope of the disaster becomes more and more apparent.

At first this episode is all about Rick, some zombies, and roadways blocked by abandoned cars. But right before the closing cliffhanger, the hero hops on a horse and rides into the city, where the handful of ghouls he’s faced before—and has tried to kill with some measure of compassion—turn into a relentless horde, devouring his animal and grabbing for him. The way “Days Gone Bye” ends, with an overconfident Rick overwhelmed by monsters and facing certain death, represented the first of many cases where The Walking Dead has presented a glimmer of hope and then quickly snuffed it out. As great as this episode is, it’s also a superior example of what has at times made the series’ long- term prospects seem untenable. After a certain point, the characters have to stop running into dead ends, or else the story just keeps doubling back on itself, with diminishing returns. Watch Please Give HDQ. Then again, in following this path, The Walking Dead’s writers are really just doing what every other “serious” TV show does these days. The Walking Dead frequently indulges in two of modern prestige drama’s worst traits: slow- drip storytelling, and mistaking nihilism for sophistication.

Find the latest TV recaps, photos, videos and clips, news and more on MSN TV. UPDATED with additional information: Jerrod Carmichael says that for an upcoming episode of his edgy NBC series The Carmichael Show, the racial slur “nigger” will.

Episode Recap The Cosby Show on TV.com. Watch The Cosby Show episodes, get episode information, recaps and more. Bill Cosby, Music Department: Bill Cosby: Himself. Bill Cosby is one of the world's most well-known entertainers and comedians. William Henry Cosby, Jr. With Bill Cosby, Phylicia Rashad, Keshia Knight Pulliam, Malcolm-Jamal Warner. The goings-on in the life of a successful African American family.

The latter is the more pernicious. Very early on, this show developed a reputation as one where any character could die at any time, which has the desired effect of building tension within any given episode, but which over time has become something of a drag to watch. The relentless despair of The Walking Dead goes beyond the conventions of dramatic catharsis, and becomes almost like punishment. Ultimately, we have to start asking what we’re hoping to derive from watching, and what the writers are trying to tell us.

The Cosby Show pilot episode uses the same title sequence as the rest of the first season, and is widely regarded as the 'first episode'. However, it is notable for a. Cosby Show ou Les Huxtable au Québec (The Cosby Show) est une série télévisée américaine en 201 épisodes de 24 minutes, créée par Bill Cosby et diffusée.

The premiere episode “Days Gone Bye” delivered 67 minutes of intimate human drama, pulse-pounding adventure, and literally jaw-dropping zombie horror.

The Walking Dead’s frequent contemplations of what it means to be “strong” or to be a “leader” keeps coming down to whomever can be the most callous, and who can kill without compunction. I’ve lost track of how many times The Walking Dead (and Fear The Walking Dead) characters have walked up to a skilled zombie- slayer and asked, “How’d you learn to do that?” and “Can you teach me?” These shows treat pulling the trigger of a gun as though it were some arcane skill that only the best of the best of us can even utilize, let alone master. That faith in violence above all other action can be discomfiting. To some extent, The Walking Dead is just trying to be matter- of- fact about the world it’s depicting, by exploring the ironies and tragedies of an extreme survival situation. Retweets don’t necessarily equal endorsements, in other words. But over the years The Walking Dead has also fallen into a dreary rut with its story arcs, where again and again the kindly and the compassionate get murdered and/or eaten, while the assholes thrive. The bad guys eventually get some kind of comeuppance, but rarely in a way that suggests that their fundamental philosophy is wrong.

No one gets to be the boss on this show by being a capable farmer—even though that’s probably a better contribution to rebuilding the Earth than hardening into a remorseless killer. I’ve been writing about The Walking Dead’s past few seasons for Rolling Stone, and while I still like the show, I do wonder quite often what point it’s trying to make, and whether it’s one I would support if I were talking it out with a buddy at a bar.