You only need to think back a few years to remember when The Walking Dead was the undisputed king of the geek media landscape. AMC’s adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s comic book opus shocked us with outrageous violence, drew us in with complex character interaction and left us endlessly speculating about what the next episode would bring.
But with the comic riding off into the sunset a few months ago, how much more juice does the TV franchise have in it? Critical response has been declining steadily in the last few seasons, and the audience continues to decrease (it’s still one of the most-watched shows on cable), but April’s season 9 finale was down 37% in viewers from the season 8 ender a year before. That’s not a good sign, especially at a multi-million dollar price tag per episode.
This doesn’t seem to be bothering the network, though. In an interview last year, AMC CEO Josh Sapan outlined plans to keep the franchise going for another decade at the very least. But has the cultural moment of The Walking Dead come and gone? Let’s dig deeper and see what we can see.
Goodbye Old Friends
Cast churn is always a part of a series with a high body count like The Walking Dead. But this latest season is forcing viewers to say goodbye to several of their favorites. Danai Gurira has announced that she’s done playing long-time fan favorite Michonne after this one, and Lauren Cohan’s Maggie made her exit in season 9. But most notably, Andrew Lincoln decided he was done with the grind and forced the exit of series protagonist Rick Grimes.
Robert Kirkman was always very clear about when the comic book would draw to a close. The Walking Dead was Rick’s story, and when he died so would the book. Fans expected him to draw things to a close with the 200th issue, only to be bushwhacked from out of nowhere in July’s issue 193 with the unannounced ending. For comparison, the events that the TV show is adapting in Season 10 start at around issue 145. That leaves nearly 50 comic books that revolve around Rick that will need to be significantly altered.
The show has long played fast and loose with the source material, which is for the best, but it’s going to be tough to tackle some of these later storylines. One guess is that they’ll push Norman Reedus’s popular Daryl Dixon into the leadership role to fill the gap as the remaining survivors unite to battle the psychopathic Alpha and her crew of Whisperers who skulk through the night wearing the skins of zombies as camouflage.
Reedus, along with Melissa McBride, are the two cast members who have survived since the first season, and they both have their fans. But it’s really hard to make an ensemble show work after the ostensible lead has departed – think about how dire X-Files was in the eighth season after David Duchovny mostly peaced out, or how The Office suffered post-Steve Carell. We still haven’t seen how The Walking Dead is going to find its footing in a post-Rick world, and it’s a big question.
Less Is More, More Is Too Much
Fear The Walking Dead launched in 2015 with a hot premise: since Rick was comatose at the beginning of the original outbreak, let’s jump back in time to see how it played out through the eyes of some new characters. It was a solid idea for a spin-off, the show was at the height of its popularity, and for the most part it worked. Setting the action in urban Los Angeles gave showrunners new dangers to play with, and the slow burn of the first season was smart and solid, using zombies as punctuation to a larger story.
Then it started to go off the rails. Once the leads took to the sea on their way to Mexico, the propulsive thrust of the early episodes was replaced by aimless meandering and stunningly dumb horror movie cliche decisions. By the fourth season, the producers had transplanted Morgan Jones over from the main series to try and inject some vitality into what had long gone off the rails. It didn’t work.
The show’s fifth season was unforgivably bad, with many pundits pronouncing it one of the worst shows on television, full stop. Continuity gaffes abounded, characters suddenly know how to do complex things like fly an airplane or refine oil into gasoline without an Internet to consult, and plot points mandated by what the story needs to do at that point in time rather than any sense of logic. The show had two script supervisors in that season alone, and it showed. Fear will return in 2020, but the series has burned off most of its goodwill among fans.
We’ll see if AMC can right the ship with the new (and still untitled) third spin-off, which is set ten years after the Walker outbreak first began – i.e. the same timeframe as the current season of the main show. Early images released don’t really show anything different from what we’ve already seen, though – harried survivors, desolate abandoned towns, rotting corpses. At this point they could probably call it More The Walking Dead, and that’s… not great. If they can’t keep the two shows they already have interesting, how is adding a third going to help?
The answer: it’s probably not, creatively. But it will make them more money.
Money And Power
AMC has plenty of reasons to not let The Walking Dead go. As the first show produced in-house at the network’s own studio, they maintain exploitation rights to the franchise across a number of mediums. They’ve already turned a significant profit by licensing the main show’s past seasons to Netflix and Fear‘s to Hulu. Throw in the success of The Talking Dead and the hordes of merch, all of which the network gets a cut of, and you can see the incentive for keeping the cash cow alive.
But there has to be more to making great TV than just money. You have to think that the first season of The Walking Dead was a big gamble for AMC. Although the network had hits with original programming before, those were mostly critical darlings like Mad Men and Halt and Catch Fire. Along with Breaking Bad, TWD turned the network into a legitimate cultural powerhouse, and it’s instructive to note how their programming has changed since its premiere – instead of cerebral dramas, it now invests in horror and action like NOS4A2 and Preacher.
The suits at AMC are also setting their sights on bigger screens. Even though Andrew Lincoln isn’t on the TV show anymore, he’s still signed to star in three theatrical Walking Dead films, the first of which is expected in 2020. This is quite a leap for the franchise – in general, movies based on currently-running TV shows don’t do great, and by the time it’s out Rick will have been away from the show for nearly two years. Is there really a demand to pay twenty bucks to see a more expensive Walking Dead episode on the big screen?
Wrapping It Up
Sticking the ending is one of the toughest challenges for any TV show, and let’s be frank: most of them blow it. Who can forget the feeling of immense disappointment we had after the season finale of Lost, for instance. While Kirkman’s comic had a clear, compelling and well-earned ending, it looks like AMC wants to have their cake and eat it too – keep the show going without Rick, use the character in movies, and tell both Kirkman’s original story and multiple spin-offs.
In the business world there’s something called the “curse of success,” where people who make it big based on a great idea can often get trapped by it, watching it get less great every year. It’s notable that AMC hasn’t struck gold with any new series since The Walking Dead, and it’s not for lack of trying. But harnessing the network’s fortune to a single rotting horse for the next decade seems like a poor strategic choice.
We should be able to see pretty quickly if Sapan’s ten year plan still has legs. The reception of the third WD series is probably going to be the biggest indicator of whether the franchise can – or deserves to – survive.
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