Stepping out on ‘The Walking Dead’
Our columnist has had enough of the drama.
I’m breaking up with The Walking
Dead. And it’s long overdue.
I’m not the first viewer to call it quits on AMC’s long-running zombie drama, which returned for the second half of its eighth season Sunday. And I won’t be the last. But I probably should have dropped off long ago, before watching started to feel like a chore.
I held on for years as the show spiraled in quality (and more recently, ratings, though it’s still tops on cable) just because I once loved it so much. Dead is the kind of show that has peaks and valleys. Its best seasons and episodes could knock you off your feet. Its worst could have you shouting at the screen in frustration. But the fact that it had been so good kept me thinking it could be good again. Eventually, I thought, the downswing would be over, and I’d remember why I liked the series in the first place.
But the decline isn’t ending. The series became more popular and is lasting much longer than anyone could have imagined. But aging series inevitably lose the magic that earned them such long runs. We are past that point with Dead.
I thought, for a while, that Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) was the problem. The scenery-chewing, bat-swinging villain was a bore from the moment he appeared onscreen, and his long-teased arrival was bungled and underwhelming. But Season 8 made it clear that the real problem is the series ran out of stories worth telling. Villains show up and wreak havoc on Rick and his family, but our survivors keep going and eventually win. Some people die. The walkers keep coming, against all odds. This happens over and over. Only the details change.
Sunday’s midseason premiere was, essentially, a 56-minute exercise in thumb-twiddling and time-wasting. The writers managed to draw out Carl’s (Chandler Riggs) inevitable death for the entire episode, a torturous, maudlin affair that felt cheap and runs counter to the rules the series had established — remember how quickly Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green) turned into a walker less than one season ago?
I’m tired of that. I’m tired of the rules changing just for plot convenience. I’m tired of suspending my disbelief when it comes to the endless supply of zombies, or the infallibility of the protagonists and, sometimes, their antagonists. I’m tired of the show’s internal one-upmanship that leads its writers to come up with increasingly gross, bloody and violent ways to shock its audience. Executive producer Greg Nicotero told Enter
tainment Weekly the series will soon feature its first “fully nude” zombie, a staggeringly transparent and cheap ploy. How does that serve the show?
The best part about giving up on something you once loved is that you don’t have to be angry about it anymore. Go ahead and have your naked zombie,
Walking Dead. Keep Negan alive forever and redeem him, as the vision in Sunday’s episode seemed to indicate. Keep the zombies coming for 100 years into the future of this post-apocalyptic Earth.
I just won’t be watching.