The whole premise of the walking dead slowly appearing is pretty ridiculous. If its already over 5 states, how could it not have become well known.
I like that part. It makes complete sense to me that people would dismiss stuff like the police shoot-out as fakes, as opposed to immediately jumping to OMG ZOMBEES!!1!!
Agreed. The whole point is that it isn't a pandemic, i.e. 90% of the world dies and comes back and 10% immune have to fight off the herd. The "flu" infects everyone very rapidly, but until they die they do not turn. That means people have to actually die of some other reason to get this started. That right there makes it a slow start and not like 28 days later or I Am Legend where the "flu" is what turns people. We know this works differently, so until you start to get a mass scale of zombies, it will start slower.
Think about it this way, we know about zombie lore, but when you heard about the dudes biting people's faces off in Florida, what did you instantly think, that the zombie apocalypse started or that man some real whacked out crap is always happening in Florida. I would think the latter and think that the police shoot-out was fake, because in our world that police shoot-out was in fact a fake scene from the TV show this thread is about.