I almost can’t believe it myself — and I like zombies and the genre — but The Walking Dead is the best-written, most well-acted and generally the finest show on television.

This was not true of seasons 1 or 2 however — while there was some good episodes from that period, and even some great ones, it was incredibly uneven, sometimes outright bad and it treated women characters as useless appendages or background noise.

In Season 3 this started to change. That outing had some truly excellent episodes. Seasons 4 and 5, however, set the bar for what television could be — with characters like Carol and Michonne and Hershel and Sasha. Well, there are just too many to list and each one felt like a real person. Like someone you could sit down and have a chat with, not some cardboard creation moving around from scene to scene as the plot demands it. Which alas all too often is the case even in many shows that I like and watch avidly.

Whatever kind of strange magic happened on The Walking Dead in seasons 3-5 where a TV show transcends its genre, transcends what you thought TV could be, and achieves some sort of grim accession to a higher reality — well, I have not seen its like before.

The Walking Dead also does dread better than any TV show I’ve ever seen. It just does so many things right and has that rare quality that Lost had of actually watching its characters not with love or derision but with studied care.

And Carol? Best female character and perhaps best character ever in a TV series? The answer to that is yes, always yes.