The intro sequence was poor, lazy exposition dump from a trio of characters that we never see or hear from again. It's like a scrolling title card from a B movie.

After 10 minutes of some stuff with Joel and his kid, we see a zombie. The show is literally a copy and paste of The Walking Dead without anything that I was expecting from a mutated fungus infecting the people of the world. They have depicted everything as just zombies.

Within the first episode there is an inexcusable time skip of 20 years. The show is now disconnected and boring, compared to what I was enjoying with the main guy and his daughter.

The next problem is a bunch of political nonsense and annoying characters take over in the first episode. The worst of all is Ellie, how did this actor get this role? She can't seem to act and it makes the scenes awkward for the others. Another issue for me is the character is shown as an annoying brat and is a hard 180 turn from the daughter character we met earlier.

In my opinion a whole season should have been used for the pandemic spread period, and then next season move time on a bit. The way HBO did it creates a whiplash effect because the time skip content is so poorly written and acted.

4/10 below average writing and presentation that misses the mark set from the source material. In my option worse than Black Summer and The Walking Dead, even with all the flaws I noted on those.