The Walking Dead vs. Dead Set

This will be brief because I watched them both over a month ago, but I wanted to jot some stuff down anyway:

My first thought was "All right, we can probably look at the pair as 'Americans reacting to a zombie apocalypse' and 'Brits reacting to a zombie apocalypse.'" But is that totally justified?

The Walking Dead is truly an AMC show: that is, it's slow. Quality at a snail's pace. There's a sheriff and his familial problems (more running time = more time to build relationships), a racist who saws his own limb off (introducing moral Issues with a capital I), and most importantly, relentless but typical zombies.

I'm a purist and don't like my zombies running about like they do in Dead Set. The Walking Dead had it right with its crawling, dismembered rotting corpses, dragging themselves across lawns...

Dead Set is roughly half the running time The Walking Dead's had so far. Maybe that's why their zombies were more frantic.

Another thing that annoyed me about Dead Set was that everyone was such a good shot, except that one time when Riq wasn't even hit after like five attempts because the story called for it. This bothered me so much it took me out of the moment every time. Brooker games, so perhaps this influenced all the one shot KO's.

The Walking Dead is a zombie show. A good one. Dead Set is a message. Using Big Brother as the backdrop for a story about zombies is nearly perfect: the way the zombie hoard charged the Big Brother house like Mecca, Nyman's producer character as the perfect villain, that final shot of Kel as a zombie shown on every screen... so good!

Something I loved in Dead Set: Kel as a strong female protagonist. I kind of wish that she'd been called Kelly the whole way through rather than her nickname, because then you get that "she's female AND the badass hero" contrast rather than the "she's the hero so she's also masculine so let's call her something less feminine" thing. Did that make sense?

Something I loved in The Walking Dead: Exploration of characters and relationships, slow burn, racial diversity.

Both excellent shows, though I think I prefer Dead Set because I appreciate the metaphor.