alive

I'm just as thrilled as ol' Annie that AMC is bringing the walking dead back to the barely alive audiences of prime time television with Frank Darabont's revisioning of the iconic Walking Dead. I was even tickled to hear that J.S. (I don't know if he hates that name or not) knew of a post-apocalyptic drama series in development hell called Alive. I've been a big fan of the post-apocalypse genre since the oil barrel zombie in Return of the Living Dead taught me that I don't have as much control over my bodily functions as I once believed.

But even though these two shows have shown just as deep TV has tried to dig its own heel-mark into the genre, it goes a lot deeper and frankly, I'm not sure you want to dig that deep. This is a show about life after an unfathomable nuclear accident that kills everyone in the world except for six people who are left to fend for themselves in an unrelenting wasteland of death, despair, destruction and death ... and it was a sitcom.

And before you ask, yes, it was on Fox.

AMC is bringing a serous, post-apocalyptic zombie suspense series to television, but it's not the first time that idea got kicked around.

As we reported, The Walking Dead is on its way to TV, with Frank Darabont writing and directing to get the series off to a good start.

But, two years earlier, a team of writer/producers planned Alive, a syndicated series featuring a small pocket of human survivors fighting to find a cure for a global viral pandemic that transformed humans into zombies.