No one would argue that The Walking Dead is a bag of laughs—at least not most weeks—but it does try to show different angles of the zombie crisis, even if it’s not always a story within a story like what Romero has allegedly been trying to do during his long and storied horror career.
Sure, World War Z especially was a pretty big production, but The Walking Dead in its earliest incarnation was still a cheaper production for AMC than your average TV series, one that reportedly even faced budget cuts early on.
The AMC drama has also been just as much about the economics of survival in a world that has turned upside down thanks to an epidemic as it has been about the violent results in the aftermath.