TV Geek Out 185: The Walking Dead, "Days Gone Bye" and "Guts"

TV Geek Out begins our coverage of AMC's smash-hit zombie series, The Walking Dead, with this epic chat about the first 2 episodes! In the premiere, "Days Gone Bye," small-town cop Rick Grimes wakes up from a coma to learn that zombies have overrun society, which mostly now looks like a ghost town scattered with corpses, both dead and undead. We discover this terrifying, sad new world along with Grimes as he heads out in search of his family and meets father-and-son survivors Morgan and Duane, and we're introduced to a camp of other survivors outside of Atlanta and discover along with Grimes that the big city is the very opposite of a safe haven. In "Guts," Grimes meets a group of people who are on a mission to retrieve supplies from Atlanta. He helps them deal with their power-hungry bigot, Merle, as well as the dilemma (partly caused by him) of how to get out of a building surrounded by hordes of famished zombies and escape the city alive. The answer leads to possibly the most disgusting couple of scenes in the history of television -- let's just be glad that TVs don't come equipped with Smell-O-Vision! TV geeks Heather, Dana, and Perry discuss how the slow, contemplative style that the show establishes fits right in with AMC's other series, and analyze how the zombie world here compares to other stand-outs in the genre, as well as the comic it was based on. Listen in to this mega-geek out here.

(Note: The "Guts" discussion begins at about 57:13.)