The Walking Dead is a show about zombies that is as slow as a snail, and packed with more filler than a stuffed animal. How do you make a show about killing living corpses boring? AMC surely knows how - they've been doing it for five years, at the very least.
AMC's The Walking Dead is a television show centered around former sheriff, Rick Grimes. After being injured in the line of duty, he wakes up to a world where the majority of the population is dead, or turned into what he and his group call "Walkers." Shambling corpses that can spread their affliction through a bite. After finding his family, Rick Grimes goes on a journey to find a place where they can truly be safe. The most tragic thing about writing this review is reflecting on how the first few seasons of this show were so good. The episodes were packed full of themes regarding the true nature of humanity, as well as what we can turn into when laws and society are no longer present. The show mainly focused on a small group of the core main characters, all of which were smartly written, and consistent. The first trap that The Walking Dead fell into as it progressed was massively increasing the number of characters. Over the course of The Walking Dead's eight seasons (so far), the group led by Rick has grown and grown, adding on more and more characters. These other background characters would cause no problem, except that rather than focus on the original group of characters, the writers try to give every character an equal amount of screen-time. This means that we don't get to see much of the characters we love, and we are forced to watch scenes with characters that we do not care about in the slightest. One of The Walking Dead's most famous features, was that it wasn't afraid to kill off its main characters. In the earlier seasons, when a character died, it was often very shocking, and considered a bold move by the writers. Now, when one of the new, useless characters gets inevitably killed to make room for more new, useless characters, their death carries no emotional weight whatsoever. The Walking Dead is now spread so thin that there is no room for character development, an thus we cannot stay invested in the characters we have known for a long time, nevertheless any new ones.
The recent seasons of The Walking Dead have also had huge issues with consistency. Characters will often do things that betray their personalities and development. A character that learns about how it is good and right to be merciful to the living will go right back to murdering everything in sight the next episode. Characters will leave the group, argue, and kill for no apparent reason other than to create fake drama. It is frustrating to watch characters that were once smart and clever do things that are immensely stupid.
All of these issues play huge roles in the degradation of The Walking Dead's quality, but perhaps the biggest contributor is the immense amount of filler packed into every episode of the show. The first few seasons may have had slow moments, but every episode serves to propel the plot forward, or at least build tension and suspense. In recent seasons, whole episodes feel like they just there to pad out the season, and seem like roadblocks to halt the plot in its tracks. The issue is that the creators are trying to stretch out a limited amount of source material, so that they can create as many seasons as possible. Parts of the original Walking Dead comics that last perhaps ten pages have been stretched into entire seasons. I remember getting the entire second season of the show on iTunes and binge watching the entire thing in a couple of days. Now I spend more time on my phone than actually watching the show when The Walking Dead is on.
I remember watching the first episode of The Walking Dead on Netflix when I was eleven or twelve, and subsequently watching the rest of the first season in one sitting as if I was in a trance. It was the first TV show that I actually felt invested in, and it also likely the first show that I ever binge watched. Since that time, many other shows have cleared that bar that The Walking Dead set, but it will always hold a special place in my heart for being one of the reasons I became as interested as I am in television and movies. This is why it is so depressing to think about how disappointing nearly every aspect of this show is now. One aspect of the show that has never really degraded was the quality of the acting. Many of the actors that portray the characters that have been here from the beginning have churned out quality performances since the first season. Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick, has been one of the cornerstones of the show from the very start. Recently, news surfaced that Andrew Lincoln would be exiting the show to work on other projects, which makes sense considering how long he has been working on this show, and this show alone. Hopefully after he leaves, AMC will do the right thing and kill off The Walking Dead once and for all.
The Walking Dead, while starting strong at a GOOD, GOOD rating, has unfortunately fell from grace to a BAD, BAD rating. At least AMC still has Better Call Saul going for it.
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