Every time I think, ‘That’s it, there’s no way The Walking Dead can get worse’, AMC finds a way to innovate.

Gotta give those devils credit (no offense to actual devils):

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — When AMC’s “The Walking Dead” returned for the second half of its season on Feb. 12, viewers were greeted with an announcement as the show started, urging them to head to www.amcstorysync.com to “start [their] two screen experience now.” It was the kick-off of the network’s interactive web experience, “storysync,” which features real-time content and discussion for fans online as they watch the show on TV.

Basically, you watch and have a laptop off to the side, and the site loads pop-up information, polls, pictures, interactive stuff, etc. Very.. distracting. It’s also not dissimilar to how I used to review Zombie movies with my laptop at my side. I can assure you that without discipline (which I find difficult at times, being an info-junkie) it really eats into the experience of something on screen.

But if you’re not interested in art so much as inflammation of your audience, well:

However, once the action got going, the storysync items slowed down to one every three to five minutes, mainly after key action or plot points. Also, the site automatically has sound enabled, which gives a quick alert noise whenever a new item pops up, so if I felt like I was getting distracted from the episode, I just minimized the window and then returned to it when I heard that to see what the new item was.

The items are primarily polls. For every zombie kill, there’s one rating its goriness with the options “barely bloody,” “serious splatter,” “guts galore,” “major carnage” and “total bloodbath.” And there are a lot of snap-judgment calls for you to vote on whether you agree or disagree with something a character just did or said.

There’s another, called a decision poll, where you pick what you think the characters should do from a list of three or four options. This, of course, doesn’t affect the action on screen, but I thought it was fun to see the results of those and the other polls and whether I was in the majority of each vote or not.

Didn’t Futurama already do these decision polls, albeit in the fictional future?

Granted, theirs actually worked, which is simultaneously cooler and more awful.

I for one cannot believe, and yet can’t bring myself to be shocked, that AMC is running live polling to get viewers to rate the violence inflicted against the innocent Undead by depraved redneck survivalists in The Walking Dead. What is the world coming to? Now we need instant feedback on our cruelty?!

On the other hand… there’s a live chat where you can register your thoughts… how long do you think they’d wait to ban me if I was civil?

Potential outreach opportunity there.

Tags: Robert Kirkman, Television, The Internet

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, February 26th, 2012 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.