Calm Before the Storm

Calm Before the Storm

  By Nancy Dewolf Smith

The Walking Dead

Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC

As the fourth season of "The Walking Dead" begins, it seems clear that a nice tone shift is under way. Ever since Georgia sheriff's deputy Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) woke from a coma to find himself in a world ravaged by zombies, the AMC series has focused on Rick and the remaining humans trying to survive. Now, for a time anyway, they are learning to live.

The group at the center of the story is settled in the abandoned prison they fought for so hard in Season 3, when scores of characters, including Rick's wife, died. After many, many months, and with experience and the will to do what it takes to stay alive—the group finally has time to breathe. There are some iPods for music, fresh comic books for the kids and showers on demand.

Some spend their time growing vegetables and raising animals. Others celebrate their affection in shared duty above watch towers. Even the most hardened hunters, someone says, may have to "learn to live with the love." The young people gather for story times in a library filled with classic tales from the time before "the turn"—assumed to be a global infection that made anyone who dies as a human arise as a flesh-eating zombie, or "walker."

Walkers still surround the prison fortress, pressing on the chain link fence around it. But even Tyreese (Chad L. Coleman) is trying to kick back, leaving behind his duty killing zombies at the fence by piercing them with sharp objects and going on supply runs outside the prison instead.

Yet both outings in the first episode—one involving a survivor found in the woods and another set in a market—prove again that no one is ever safe. Episode two will bring a new threat; one that will be chillingly real to viewers. The lull of "30 days without an accident" will be over.

Some fans of the series—created by Frank Darabont and based on the comic-books by Robert Kirkman, who is a writer and producer for the television show—would prefer more combat and less talking. Big questions are what count, though. What separates the living and the walkers if the living lose their humanity trying to stay alive? "I couldn't sacrifice one of us for the greater good," Rick said last season, "because we are the greater good." But the razor's-edge choices, the violent necessities of survival are always there. Some have sought to pre-empt the fear of predation with suicide. Even watching examples of self-sacrifice, such as the time Rick was willing to risk being sucked dry giving his son a blood transfusion, is not that uplifting when the next day you may be eaten alive.

Meanwhile, old questions and enemies persist. What happened to the vicious "Governor"? What's in Macon, past 70 miles of walkers? New group members have secrets—is one of them trying to lure zombies to the prison? As one of the children says, the walkers should not be hated just for being "different." Uh oh.

Some of us like "The Walking Dead" best when it involves interactions with remnants of civilization, such as the last days of the Centers for Disease Control. It may sound like travesty, but given the gore, the payoff that will make it worth bearing is a pot of gold in the form of a cure.

Schooled: The Price of College Sports

Wednesday at 8 p.m. on Epix

Is the enforced amateurism of NCAA athletes a plot by greedy schools, coaches and other authorizes—abetted by alumni and fans—to make billions "off the backs" of talented 19 year olds? Is the failure to pay the cynically named "student athletes" a human- and civil-rights violation that will someday be regarded as being down on a par with "the plantation mentality"?

Those are two questions that dominate "Schooled: The Price of College Sports," a documentary on Epix based on a 2011 article in the Atlantic by historian Taylor Branch, adapted from his 2011 book, "The Cartel." It will be infuriating to watch.

Not just if it's all true. The film's condemnation is so sweeping that you feel like you've just been buttonholed by a lawyer behind the class-action suit making its way through the courts on behalf of people alleging they were wronged by the college athletics system. He may be telling the truth, but you get the feeling you aren't hearing the whole story.

A documentary in name and a diatribe in effect, the film pounds away at its theme with a list of horror stories about the status quo, towered over by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Some complaints are from players, who explain how the system forces them to play college sports for no pay. We are told how some must go hungry because their schools, including UCLA, do not provide enough food—and the risk of not getting an education because they spend 50 hours a week grinding away for the glory of a school and the enrichment of others.

Statistics pour out: 98.5% of NCAA basketball and football players will never turn pro and hit the jackpot. But universities pull in some $6.6 billion from these unpaid laborers. All the athletes get offered is a free education, room and board. No wonder in most states, we're told, the highest-paid state official is a college coach ($5.6 million is cited). Though sports journalists and many others echo the theme of unfairness, none is more eloquent than Mr. Branch himself.

Some voices pipe up in defense of the status quo, noting that student athletes get many benefits not available to others. If they don't like the conditions of their scholarships, someone says, they can "take out loans like the rest of us did."

Most of the time, the defenders of the student-athlete system are setting up slam dunks by their critics. Aren't those students really just employees, the critics ask, being forced to toil for nothing in the hope of a crack at professional play? Columnist Joe Nocera says that "a mass murderer has more legal rights than a football player in the NCAA system."

Really? Infuriating that you can't see the truth through the hyperbole.

Doc Martin: Series 6

Streaming on Acorn.tv.com

Many PBS stations have been running past seasons of "Doc Martin," to the delight of all who've discovered this British dramedy. Martin Clunes stars as a London surgeon who became phobic about blood and relocated to a seaside village in Cornwall to become the only GP there. Although Doc Martin has a brusque and often offensive bedside manner and finds it difficult to be social in any setting, he is a brilliant diagnostician and is beloved by the village school mistress Lousia (Caroline Catz). Other townspeople, some eccentric, some mad and some almost tragic, weave in and out. Just hearing the theme music at the beginning is enough to transport one to a happy place.

Doc Martin can be difficult to find on my home-state PBS station, which spends weeks at a time now pre-empting normal fare for fundraising, with repeated shows about doo-wop music and thinly disguised infomercials (with titles in the vein of "Dr. So-and-So Stumpo and Your Brain on Fire"). But no station will have the newest season (six) of Doc Martin, which began streaming on Acorn.TV.com this month. The first episode began on Oct. 7 and each Monday another will be added. Judging by the first two episodes, the village of Port Wenn, in Cornwall, U.K. is as enchanting as ever.

Gem Hunt

Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on the Travel Channel

Has any show ever had a more alluring title than "Gem Hunt"? Each week gemologist Ron LeBlanc and two Canadian associates transport themselves to some corner of the world, navigating the street stalls, mines and quasi-underworld of the local trade in stones. One hunt is for a giant star ruby, and for that they head to what the narrator delightfully calls "the communist stronghold of Vietnam." There Ron and his friends are showed a fake emerald the size of a football and shadowed by "big brother," here in the person of a man in a familiar brown military uniform riding in a silver Ford. Then they meet some gem dealers in a jungly hut who ply them with shots of rice wine that they cannot refuse. "This is so 'Deer Hunter,'" Ron chirps approvingly.

More, please.

A version of this article appeared October 11, 2013, on page D8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Calm Before the Storm.