The Re-Animator
The Walking Dead gets a brain transplant in the form of new showrunner Glen Mazzara.
By Boris Kachka Published Feb 5, 2012
By any standard, AMCs zombie drama, The Walking Dead, is a success; by cable-TV standards, its a record-breaker and a paradigm shiftproof that basic cable can produce genuine hits that draw nearly 9 million *viewers per episode and not just critical darlings like the same networks Mad Men and Breaking Bad. And yet for anyone following the shows dismal reviews or the crisis that culminated in the firing of its creator, Frank Darabont, this past July, it looks like a project bent on self-sabotage. Fortunately, Darabonts replacement as showrunner knows how to handle stress. Glen Mazzara, whose voice betrays his Queens roots, began his career as a New York hospital administrator before breaking into TV. Tight schedules, people with different agendas, tight budgets, he says, rattling off the parallels. And youre always waiting for a cardiac arrest. Lately hes been trotting out a more dramatic professional analogy. Im the guy in The Hurt Locker, Mazzara says. I get sent in in the suit to try to defuse things.
The source of last summers explosion is still murky. A cavalcade of theories followed in its wake: Darabont couldnt get along with AMCs head of original programming, Joel Stillerman; he tried to shoehorn his film sensibility (he directed The Shawshank Redemption) into a TV mold; one of his directors turned in unusable footage on a crucial episode; he railed against rumored budget cuts. Mazzara confirms a post-*Darabont scramble to clean up a ragged second-season premiere, but he and an AMC spokesperson deny any belt-tightening. Ive been nickel-and-dimed by studios before, he says. They have not nickel-and-dimed this show. Darabont refused to comment for this story, but three months before his dismissal, he appeared at a showrunners roundtable and complained about AMCs attitude toward its shows: Theres an asset that has proved to be quite a valuable asset. Why are you trying to gut the budget? It doesnt make business sense to me.
Whatever the case, the crisis of confidence among cast and crew was very real. Mazzara seems to have conquered it, but
the public jury wont be in until February 12. Thats when the show returns from its mid-second-season hiatus and when viewers get to see the first episode made entirely on Mazzaras watch.
Mazzara thought twice about taking the job. He had always functioned best as a right-hand man who comes in in a nonthreatening way to help a showrunner attain his vision. His No. 2 gig on The Shield went better than stints running cable duds Hawthorne and Crash. He was replaced on the latter, so I know that its a very painful thing to lose a show. And he would always be thought of as The Walking Deads *replacement chief. Here was the third instance where I was signing on to execute someone elses vision, and what if it didnt go right? It could have killed my career.
Mazzara flew to Atlanta to sweet-talk the actorsmost of them deeply devoted to Darabontin the middle of a sweltering midsummer shoot. He just said, I was very happy where I was at,  says the shows Norman Reedus, who plays Daryl, a hick with a crossbow and a heart of gold. He wasnt the bad guy in the situation, and he wanted to let us know that. Or, as Mazzara insists to me, I am not an auteurI am not. Okay?
But Mazzara couldnt sweet-talk a blogosphere teeming with flesh-hungry fanboys. They had eaten up the premise of The Walking Dead, based on a beloved comic by Robert Kirkman: A small-town cop leads an enclave of zombie-*apocalypse survivors outside Atlanta, battling not just the undead but their own darker human impulses. Yet many bristled at the leaden dialogue and improbable twists that plagued the first season. Between seasons, Darabont axed most of the writing team and brought on the author of its best episode, Mazzara, as executive producer in charge of hiring a new staff. Mission unaccomplished: The first half of the second season was savaged for lumbering along, zombielike, almost entirely within the confines of a single farm. Since Darabont had already been let go (having signed off on that first half), fans were tempted to blame Mazzara.
Its on this point that Mazzaras auteur ego rears its head. The fans, he says, dont understand whats mine, whats Franks, what needed to be done to improve the show. As an example, he brings up the shows recent confession by policeman Ricks wife, Lori, that shed slept with his best friend, Shane. Darabont thought it was too much plot development, Mazzara sayseven though viewers had known about the affair since the series premiere. Mazzara chalks it up to Darabonts film mentality. Franks story*telling is told with the entire picture in mindwhich works on a feature, he says. Having worked in episodic TV for a long time, I realize that the audience gets hungry for stuff and cannot be too far ahead of the characters. Otherwise they feel the characters are *stupid or not worth their time. With *Darabont gone, he put the scene in.
Mazzaras goal, moving forward, is to accelerate and then figure out more *story. His second-half opener features a tense standoff, new characters, and the promise of broader horizons. I feel that the show has been a little insular, he says. I want to widen it. All of a sudden the outside world starts encroaching on our farm. And now theres the suspense of, whos out there? Are they coming? And all the interpersonal *dynamics of the group are at loggerheads over this new threat.
The writers have already moved on to season three, which AMC recently expanded to sixteen episodes. Thats exactly where Mazzara wants to be. If you want to know who I am, he says, I hate when a show Im working on is broadcast. Im dreading when the show comes back on. Im sure people will like it, but I dont like the spotlight, and I cant wait for the last one to run so I can get back to work.