The whole point!!!

Really??

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26 days until the Dead rise

When they first announced this show I envisioned in my mind not just one group they would showcase but multiple groups to show how different the beginning was for different people. I thought they would go back and forth showing a little of each person or group, just like they did when Rick's group was separated. Perhaps they would eventually all meet up and form a group of their own so you could see how they evolved from the beginning to when they met. The hotel could have been a good episode if they did that with everyone that showed up there and you found out what lead them all there. I think that would have been a good series.

Good point. Different episodes could have shown the breakdown in different places. That gives enough settings and surprising situations, that kind of story could have gone on for awhile.

What about people going in to a movie theater, and coming out 2 hours later to run into zombies in the lobby? Their whole world changed while they were in the movie! What would that look like? How would people deal? Who would win and who would lose and die, and why? The theater doesn't even have to be overrun with zombies. Just enough zombies to make people go WTF? Hesitate, mind blown. Trying to figure it out. Some might get closer, and stand and stare - like people just standing there watching a tsunami come in to envelope them in death, because they don't know what they're looking at. Other people run, but which way do you run? Then you see some die, and everyone's trying to figure out what to do, where to go, where can they go, what's around the corner? Should they go around the corner, or go through a door? In order to leave, you gotta go through a door somewhere! But what's on the other side? It might be okay. You don't know. You just saw people die by making the wrong choice. Are you about to make the wrong choice? That's FEAR.

And might you think about this the next time YOU go to a movie in real life?

That could have been drawn out longer, to make interesting TV. Show completely different characters in different settings, all experiencing the first hours/days of the outbreak simultaneously. Eventually have some survivors from each location make their way to that military-protected town. Instead of this Madison/Travis/Daniel/Dearly-Departed Wife And Their Kids drama. The existence of that family shows that this show was written to be about THEM from the get-go, not really the outbreak.