Television is too often discounted as innocuous and even destructive to any kind of substantial discourse about culture and art. Yet, the average American spends five hours a day channel surfing. This makes television an essential aspect of any consideration of American culture or life, including religion. The challenge is to seek out the programs that resonate with substantial conversations.

AMC has produced some of the most talked about TV shows in the last ten years. With shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, AMC presents complex characters facing extreme conditions. Perhaps the most striking and surprising is a show about zombies called The Walking Dead. At first glance it has all the makings of a B movie with a mysterious disease that awakens the dead with an appetite for brains, but underneath that facade lies a story of a family, struggling against all odds to figure out what it means to be human in a world gone mad. One hour each Sunday, audiences are invited to comprehend mortality and the limits of human compassion.

Since Mary Shelly penned Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, the world of story telling has used monsters to hold a mirror up to the human condition and force questions that, under normal circumstances, seem better left unanswered. As the characters of The Walking Dead watch their loved ones turn from human beings into vicious animals, they come face-to-face with their own mortality and the complex questions that circle around what it means to be human all while trying to maintain a sense of order. The quest for survival and common experience of suffering formed a rag tag group of nobodies into a family of people who care and sacrifice for each other.

In the current season, the group run into a family that has survived in their farm house. What they soon learn is that the patriarch of the family, Hershel, is harboring zombies in his barn. When confronted about it he admits that they are his wife and other family members. He is convinced (as a doctor) that they are just sick and, more importantly, that they are still people. The original group tries to convince him otherwise. Hershel is presented as a loving father whose hope lies in his family. He needs to believe that he will wake up one day and these people will no longer be zombies. The realization of the truth breaks his will.

What is at stake for Hershel and the rest of the characters, as they try to survive, is the role that hope serves in times of suffering and fear. Hershel put is his faith in a false reality in which, somehow, everything will go back to normal. What the main character Rick and his family have discovered is a faith not founded on unrealistic possibilities but instead, on the power and fortitude of their relationships with each other. Though the universe has apparently betrayed them, they find hope in their community and their own sense of responsibility to each other. Whereas some survivors become barbarian and ruthless as they try to simply avoid death, Rick tries to establish a culture of hope that includes a reason to live beyond simple survival.

One of the biggest questions posed by The Walking Dead is not so much the question of “what if” but instead much deeper questions about what it means to be human. So many of the survivors are attempting to avoid becoming zombies, but in that effort they abandon all concept of what it means to be human. This leads one to question whether the walking dead are the zombies or the survivors who no longer find meaning.

What AMC offers is way for people to access many of the themes present in Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. The survivors experience the stages of shock, apathy, and disillusionment in every episode. Each one struggles with it in his or her own way, and it is inspiring to see them find a reason to not only survive but build a new life in this wasteland.

Just as Frankl suggests, Rick and the group of survivors he leads find meaning in small moments and instances of grace that speckle their otherwise hopeless and grim situation. One such moment is found when Rick is in a forest with his young son and they come across a buck. In the middle of a hopeless search for a lost friend they have this brief moment of grace in which a child is able to experience wonder. Immediately after, Rick’s son is accidentally shot and Rick is consumed by terror, but still, that moment helped Rick find meaning in his and his family’s survival. This moment is one among many smaller oases of meaning. The community they have created has become a haven of meaning itself.

Anyone who has seen The Walking Dead will tell you that it is about more than zombies.   It’s about the beauty and complexity found in human relationships in extreme conditions. What is incredible is that the millions of people who tune in each Sunday are given a platform to engage in a discussion about human dignity, finding meaning, and the importance of community.

Image: Bob Jagendorf (Attribution via Wikimedia Commons)