How The Walking Dead chronicles humanity’s inevitable, sad decline

Is there still hope for sanity and humanity at a time when zombies stalk the earth? That’s what lawman Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) needs to believe. It’s the one idea that sustains him throughout the death and chaos that define AMC’s The Walking Dead. But the series offers little hope for Rick or for viewers watching at home. Instead, as peace and prosperity recede further and further into the past, the characters on the show rely increasingly on violence to settle their differences. That is the depressing reality highlighted by a sobering and thought-provoking new video from YouTuber Ryan Hollinger. As Hollinger sees it, a show like The Walking Dead merely chronicles the last gasps of civilization and society before the world devolves into an utter wasteland, like the one depicted in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road. The characters in the McCarthy novel might even look at something like The Walking Dead as being “the good old days.”