Laziest Writing: Walking Dead vs. The Following

In response to I’ll Chalk It Up to Zombie Habit-Viewing:

So I started watching The Following mostly because I generally like Kevin Bacon. Let me just say that the characters on The Following make the ones on Walking Dead look like savants.

There is so much dumb required to get through every episode of The Following it is almost unbearable. Recently, they had the three goons who had kidnapped a boy surrounded in a farm house with 100 yards of grass on all sides. They had police, SWAT teams, even a helicopter supposedly. But it turned out one of the female cops from the local town was secretly a follower of the villain. With the help of two guys who sneak up on SWAT officers and kill them around the back of the house, they get away with the kid. Let’s consider the fail:

1. You don’t get the drop on two SWAT guys who are on the lookout for people coming or going. Sorry, no.
2. As for the double agent/cop. Why is a seemingly normal, responsible woman (a cop!) drawn to a cult run by a guy who murders women? I mean, maybe I can see some kind of loser beta males joining up because they hate women or something. But a woman with a real job? Sorry, I’m going to need something from the writers to explain this psychology to me before they hit me with she’s one of them!
3. Where is the helicopter? Don’t they have searchlights? Can a helicopter outrun people carrying a little kid through a sparsely wooded area? Not on this show.
4. Is there no night vision in this universe?! Again, the SWAT team was in place along with the FBI. Wouldn’t they maybe have some night vision goggles to track people running from the house at night? It’s not like they have to worry about the spotlight from the helicopter.
5. Roadblocks anyone? We’re in a rural area with just a few roads coming and going. In this show it’s apparently easy to defeat FBI roadblocks while transporting a kidnapped child.
6. The mother of the kidnapped child is depicted as furious that her son hasn’t been returned. She never has a word of condolence for the 4 cops who were killed trying to rescue him.

By contrast, only Andrea comes off as a major idiot in this season of the Walking Dead.