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When Art Needs to Earn Your Attention

I have reached the end of my rope with The Walking Dead.

It has become yet another AMC show to decide that spending hours upon hours with no plot or character development is totally acceptable, as long as you tell the viewers to keep "investing."

Well, guess what?

I'm not investing anymore.

Not without a good reason.

The Killing had everybody "investing" and then they didn't even clear up the season-long mystery during the season finale.

Sorry, but once bitten, twice shy.

I don't expect every episode of a television show to be gold, but I do expect plot progression over the course of the season, especially when a season is only ten to thirteen episodes long.

Instead, I see what appears to be a lot of writers with two episodes worth of plot trying to stretch it out all season (I'm looking at you, Ryan Murphy).

Every time you complain that a movie or a television is boring, people say that we've lost our collective attention spans as a society.

That's true, but that doesn't excuse a piece of art from dragging.

Art still needs to be necessary. What's happening now is that art needs to be more necessary, more relevant, and more riveting--and I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

There's so much to read, view, experience that we don't want to waste time, and because in most instances, you can't tell if your "investment" is going to pay off or not, you just don't bother at all.

I don't think that makes anybody a cultural caveman.

Shows like Lost managed to be interesting throughout most of their run and still carry a story over the course of multiple seasons.

And yet other shows struggle with this, and then hide behind what appears to be artistic acting and directing, when really it's just killing for time.

The person in charge of all these "reflective" episodes of The Walking Dead needs to realize that if I wanted to meditate, I'd take a yoga class. I watch shows about zombies because I want to be enthralled.

If this show can't give it to me, I know plenty others that can.

Maybe our attention spans haven't shortened. Maybe there's just so much more to pay attention to.

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