AMC’s motto is “Story Matters Here”, and with Mad Men consistently proving to be the best written and most entertaining show on television it’s a hard one to refute. This year’s first season of spy-drama Rubicon also proved to be engaging and well crafted, and I had high hopes for comic-book adaptation The Walking Dead. The first episode however, left something to be desired.

There has been a glut of zombie films, games, comics and books in the last few years (eclipsed (pun somewhat intended) only by the avalanche of vampire media). Arguably this makes things harder for a new show telling a similar story to develop its own character and stand out from the crowd: The Walking Dead‘s pilot fails.

Here is an hour’s worth of television comprised almost entirely of zombie movie cliches. When the show’s main character wakes up in a hospital and stumbles out into the newly post-plague world it’s difficult to see the whole 15 minute sequence as anything other than a giant homage to / steal from 28 Days Later. What follows is the requisite set of scenes where a couple of survivors hole up in an abandoned building and explain to our hero what has happened. It’s a scene we’ve all witnessed so many times that we could easily write it ourselves; which, of course, makes it wholly unnecessary. And what’s worse, the fact that not on character uses the Z-word is painfully contrived. The scriptwriters are seemingly so shy about calling their “walkers” what they are that entire scenes pass laboriously that could have been replaced by someone saying “Oh, it’s like those Romero movies.”

Which is the show’s other big problem. Right up until the last scene of the episode there isn’t one hint of humour. It’s not that it has to be Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland (though both of those handled their explication a lot better), but it’s going to be a long season if we’re expected to watch The Road every week. AMC’s other big shows balance humour and drama adeptly, and it would be a shame if The Walking Dead too itself too seriously.

But, if we’re being optimistic, perhaps The Walking Dead has a secret weapon. For all of the zombie stories we’ve been told recently, from the Left 4 Dead games to Stephen King’s novel Cell, we haven’t had one with this show’s potential longevity. If AMC mean what they say, that it’s story that really matters, they have a chance to prove it over dozens of hours of television. Hopefully The Walking Dead is simply playing the long game; it’s just a shame we had to get through an hour’s worth of by-the-numbers prologue first.