The Walking Dead lived long enough to become the Zombie

A post-mortem on how TV's highest rated show is reaching such a quiet end this weekend

Photo: AMC

Hey everyone—Myles here. In my ongoing quest to ensure A.V. Club contributors are able to gain closure on their unfinished assignments, Alex McLevy reached out to me earlier this fall about whether there was any interest in coverage of the final episodes of AMC’s The Walking Dead. And the truth was…well, there wasn’t any (to the point even The A.V. Club didn’t pick coverage back up), which was the story in itself. Accordingly, I asked Alex to reflect a bit on how we got to TV’s biggest show going out with a whimper, and he’ll be back on Monday for a finale review for paid subscribers.

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During a recent episode of the podcast Into It, guest Damon Lindelof (the man behind HBO’s Watchmen, The Leftovers, and—most [in-]famously—part of the creative team behind Lost) explained the challenge of saying no to networks and executives eager to extend the shelf life of a TV hit. “It’s always gonna be hard,” he says, “because once you’ve got someone’s attention, you want to keep it. And so the idea of letting it go, and not knowing if you’re ever gonna get it back again, is sort of antithetical to the way that we’re wired.” But after a beat, he gave a much simpler explanation: “People don’t want things to end. I do. But in general, the audience wants them to perpetuate.”

Is there a more clear-cut case of something being extended past its televisual sell-by date in recent memory than The Walking Dead, which concludes its run this weekend? The most common assessment of the long-running AMC show is that it should’ve ended its run years ago—that a series of diminishing returns and poor creative choices tanked the zombie apocalypse somewhere around season 8’s finale. (Just after the conclusion of the Saviors storyline, but before the ignominious would-be death of Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes, in other words.) Ratings would certainly seem to bear this out: A show that was once the biggest thing on TV and a massive hit of the kind almost never seen in the streaming era has dwindled to little more than a million viewers a week, a drop of 90+ percent of its onetime audience.

Critical assessment of the show has similarly turned. “Running on the fumes of fumes” is how a former editor of mine bitingly summed it up, and they’re far from alone. By most evaluations—commercial, critical, even fanbase-oriented (there’s more than a few laments among diehard fans about the show’s latter-day missteps, which is not something you hear from, say, Zach Snyder devotees)—TWD went on too long.

Perhaps the most apt comparison would be The Office, another show that squandered audience goodwill after the departure of its lead character. By planning to run on, ad infinitum, as though a tightly-scripted sitcom were the same thing as Days Of Our Lives, that NBC show similarly found itself spinning out creatively. It took declining viewership and the steady attrition of its most beloved characters to convince NBC and the show’s own creative team that, no, most shows aren’t just an endlessly renewable resource, in which you can slot any old collection of actors into a sturdy format and viewers will love it. In fact, both shows drive home the exact opposite message: despite what Damon Lindelof says, people actually do want their stories to end. They just want them to end well.

And while, barring some profound miracle, there’s no way The Walking Dead’s series finale can retroactively make up for the milquetoast nature of its final years, there’s a case to be made that the program earned its attempt at running in perpetuity; at least, more so than most TV shows. And that’s because of the source material. Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comics were deliberately begun as an ongoing saga without conclusion—an exploration of what comes after the end, of how people’s lives continue, and the challenge of continuing to find meaning in a world that endlessly grinds you down, hell-bent on extinguishing hope in the process.

But even Kirkman eventually realized his tale couldn’t go on forever. By his own admission, he was planning to soar years into the future, all the way toward issue #300, before even considering wrapping it up; and yet Kirkman unexpectedly and without warning ended The Walking Dead with #193 in 2019. The reason given? He felt he had run out of ideas that justified continuing the narrative. (Surely it’s no coincidence that the penultimate installment, issue #192, featured the death of…Rick Grimes.)

With such an extensive catalogue of popular and well-written stories backing it up, no wonder execs at AMC thought they had stumbled upon a perpetual-motion machine of a hit TV series. And given its enormous popularity at the time, making public statements about how there was no plan to bring the show to an end—indeed, 10 years’ worth of spinoffs and sequels were in the works—probably felt like the safest bet in the world…as long as, well, you have no real understanding of the history of the medium. TV is not comic books, especially not in the modern era of serialized drama, where we’ve been taught to expect a clearly articulated beginning, middle, and end to our small-screen narratives.

But more so than that, there is a qualitative distinction, not just a quantitative one, to the question of what kind of TV we’re watching. We as viewers bring a different set of expectations to a serialized prime-time drama than we do to episodic storytelling of the sort found in the various CSIs, NCISes, and Law & Orders littering the landscape of the past three decades. And that’s to say nothing of what we expect from soap operas, with their all-cliffhanger-all-the-time structures and lather-rinse-repeat plotting. We don’t ask for endings from the last type, just as all we need from a procedural is the ability to enjoy a complete story in one sitting, no prior or subsequent info necessary, as though every episode floated outside of time and space, occasional character beats notwithstanding.

In other words, most of us have learned how to be “good” TV watchers, so to speak. We meet programming on its own historically established terms, and will reward it with our time and attention so long as it meets predetermined criteria in creative-enough fashion. By following the lead of its source material—by acting as though it intended to spin on forever, actors coming and going, with no solid point of reference to carry us through the entirety of the narrative—The Walking Dead misunderstood its own popularity. Indeed, I believe its steady commercial downfall over the last few seasons (if you’d like to read about its rise to pop-culture dominance, well, I’ve already written that piece) isn’t just from creative exhaustion. It’s as much the result of an audience, who had already given eight years of their lives to a series, realizing the story had no end — and not only no end, but not even a plan for an end.

I’m not talking about extra-diegetic material in the form of interviews with cast and crew, or AMC’s hubris-heavy public statements on the matter; only a fraction of the audience for even wildly popular franchises pay close attention to such things. No, I mean the series itself. When the critically lambasted but still wildly popular seventh and eighth seasons—featuring the war against the Saviors and the central role of scenery-chewing (but enormously charismatic) Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Negan—concluded, it was a close to a thematically and symbolically appropriate ending as the series would ever get, up to and including the actual end. The show would’ve gone out as a juggernaut of television, even with a massively significant drop-off in viewership over the course of that two-season storyline.

Instead, season nine began, picking up 18 months later, and gave no indication that anything all that dramatic had happened, or even that it was weird to suddenly jump so far forward in time for a show that had never done anything of the sort. It felt like an acknowledgment of “Yeah, here we go again,” to an audience that had just been put through the wringer, emotionally. It didn’t give them time to process what had transpired, or devote sufficient airtime to exploring the fallout. Instead, it barreled ahead to new adventures, giving the clear impression that your past experiences weren’t very important, because we have new characters to introduce and old ones to forget, damn it. It was the definition of a series acting like it didn’t respect its audience, because it took them for granted. And then, five episodes in, it pretend-killed Rick Grimes, and jumped six years forward, as though to arrogantly say, “What’re you gonna do, stop watching? Please.”

And yet, that’s exactly what most of us did. The drop-off from season eight to nine is one of the most shocking collapses in 21st-century TV: Season eight began with eleven and a half million viewers. The end of nine was watched by barely five million people. Losing more than half your audience? That would be a body blow to any normal series; the only reason The Walking Dead survived was because the audience was so cartoonishly outsized to begin with. The final season started off with just over two million viewers, and has steadily shrunk. While any sane person excoriates audience size as an indication of caliber (holler back, Party Down fans), a falling-out that profound speaks volumes about a show above and beyond the normal ebb and flow of quality from season to season.

From Wikipedia, a full glimpse of the collapse from the show’s peak in Season 5 to its current numbers.

And in that regard, I admit it’s not just expectations for the medium that tanked it: quality control counts for something. Showrunner Angela Kang, behind the wheel for these final three seasons, has done a respectable job of injecting some life into the series, smartly foregrounding many of the best actors—including Morgan, Melissa McBride (Carol), and Cassady McClincy (Lydia)—in an effort to keep things engaging. But she has also succumbed to some of the show’s worst tendencies: refusing to kill people unexpectedly, dragging out stories that should be wrapped up quicker, and playing it too safe by half when it comes to shaking up the narrative. Even a bonus set of episodes birthed from the early days of the pandemic, which should have been a green light to play around with form and structure, ended up being largely dull character studies, bereft of invention.

Which is how we come to the end. If one considers how enormous this series was in its heyday—only five years ago—it’s startling how muted and ignored its conclusion has been. Rarely has Neil Young’s lyric about it being better to burn out than fade away felt more demonstrated. Even spinoffs touting the return of beloved centerpieces like Rick and Michonne have failed to generate much excitement, which would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. Latter-day sins, it seems, linger much more in the collective consciousness than early triumphs.

At least, in the short term. One of the most interesting questions about The Walking Dead will require the advantage of time. To wit: Will it stand it? One needs the patience of a shambling, undead zombie to find out—for now, anyway.

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As noted, Alex will be covering the finale for Episodic Medium this weekend for those who are diving back in to see how this stage of The Walking Dead universe concludes. That review will be available to paid subscribers, so no better time to join than now (especially since Twitter may be a zombie by the time that review posts).