The Greatest TV Pilots Of All Time

The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead wasted no time in terrifying viewers. The AMC post-apocalyptic zombie thriller quickly introduces us to Sheriff Rick Grimes who is navigating the creepy, grainy world in search of his family after being in a coma while the zombie virus spread across the world.

The Walking Dead creator Frank Darabont was asked to create a series or a movie inspired by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead but struggled with finding ways to make a zombie series fresh. His breakthrough came when he got a hold of the comic book series by Robert Kirkman. In a Comic-COn interview, Darabont said of Kirkman’s material, “‘Well that’s how it’s different. You do it as an extended saga. You do it for television, where it’s never been done before, and you do it with conviction and with as much art to it as you can.’ And that was very exciting, when that became a possibility… And that was followed by five years of frustration – or four years, at least, of nobody at the various networks getting it, until AMC. AMC got it.”