After reading the first 12 collected volumes of The Walking Dead, I was insanely pumped up for this TV series.

I should have known better.

Although I knew they had changed numerous things in the series from just the commercials, they are completely changing characters and their motivations.  (Spoiler warning from here on out)

Lets take Shane and Lori for instance.  In the comic series these two have sex once on the side of the road on the way to Atlanta.  Lori is racked by the guilt of leaving Rick in the hospital back home, torn with fear and she has sex with Shane just to feel something.  Although Shane wants more, Lori keeps the idea of her husband being alive in the front of her mind at all times.

In the television series we are treated to Shane being the one to keep saying, “Oh, Rick’s fine …” and then he and Lori sneak off for making out or having sex.  Lori has gone from a flawed human with one indiscretion to apparently the camp floozy.

That is just one change, although I feel completely changing a character’s motivations is fairly significant.  If that is all there was, I might not be so irritated, but we are swimming in new characters, completely pointless new scenes (please, the sewer scene from episode 2 was such obvious padding for time that it was actually insulting) and entirely new sub-plots such as Rick seeing a helicopter fly over Atlanta.

While I understand not wanting to do a slavish interpretation of the comic, the fact that series creator Robert Kirkman is involved leads to me being surprised.  If we’re supposed to treat this as a different imagining of the story, even that would be fine, but we’re you’re tell is … well … boring.  The comic is insanely gripping, and the TV series just feels like I’m moving from scene to scene with no real emotional connection to what is going on.

I’m not going to give up on it for the time being, but I’m certainly not looking forward to it each week like I thought I would. Do yourself a favor and pick-upThe Walking Dead (affiliate link) comic series if you want to see what it can be like, and you’ll instantly understand why this has been so disappointing thus far.