Last night saw the premiere of Frank Darabont’s AMC adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s Image comic book series The Walking Dead. (Needlessly verbose, I know, but accurate.)

Along with the Geek Show Podcast, we presented the first episode on the big screen at Brewvies Cinema Pub in Salt Lake City to two sold out audiences for the premiere and encore screening of the show.

I’m not familiar with any of AMC’s other dramatic offerings, though I have invested in the first season of Mad Men on Blu-ray, but haven’t even cracked it out of the plastic, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the station. Would we be seeing lots of gore and violence and swearing like we’re used to in the comic book?

I knew the creative team behind the show was second to none. Frank Darabont is a champion of the filmmaking form and Kirkman is a world-class storyteller. (And David Tattersall is an incredible Director of Photography, he also lensed all of the Star Wars prequels and quite a bit of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.) But would basic cable allow the show to breathe in all the ways it needed to?

The short answer is yes. The first 90 minute installment of this show held nothing back. It opens with a bitterly sad and shocking scene that shows us exactly how brutal the world we’re being brought into is. Rick Grimes (played beautifully by Andrew Lincoln), dressed as a Sheriff’s deputy comes across a little girl in a desolate wasteland of abandoned cars. He sees her pick up her stuffed animal and calls out to her. Slowly, she turns toward him and he can see she’s been infected with whatever is turning people into zombies. She makes a run toward him, but he shoots her in the face.

And that sets the pace for the next 90 minutes of television goodness.

We’re brought back in time after the credits to the incident which sees Rick sent to the hospital. We get a sense of his relationship with his partner, Shane, and see what kind of man he is in a normal world before he’s shot, taken by a coma, and awakens in the world we’ll be spending the rest of this series exploring.

Darabont is an excellent director of horror and makes even the simple task of getting out of the hospital a nail-biting experience.

There were a number of departures from the comics, but I think each of them were required for the adaptation to television. One of the characters from the first trade, Morgan, has a much richer story that is extended in very good ways and actually steals the best moment in the first episode for himself, catching his own wife in the cross hairs of a rifle.

The audience was completely into the show, even booing and hissing the revelation that Rick’s wife, Lori, believes her husband dead and is seeing his douche-bag of a partner, Shane. They were also actively jumpy and startled at all the right times throughout.

Things were layered together perfectly, matching the comic in all the right ways, and diverging in the most respectful ways to the source material as possible to make it perfect for television and accessible to an audience who hasn’t read the book.

If I had to give this episode a rating out of 1 to 10, it would easily be a 10. This is must-see TV and will very nicely fill the void in my heart left by the ending of LOST.

And it looks like it will be around for a while, too. In addition to the rest of this season (5 more episodes), AMC has greenlit a second full season. And since this episode had the single best viewership in AMC’s history with an estimated 5.3 million viewers (The Hollywood Reporter has the full story on the numbers), I expect we’ll be seeing a lot of this show in the future. Perhaps they can keep it up indefinitely, just like the comic.

We’ll have pictures from the event online in the next day or two. And Brewvies has asked if we’d like to come back for every episode of the series. And I think the answer is a resounding yes. Be sure to check our facebook page for details.