At this point, it's safe to say the zombie mania boom that surfaced in the midst of the 2000's has somewhat petered out. 2004's Shaun of the Dead and the Zack Snyder remake of Dawn of the Dead inspired subgenre godfather George Romero to provide a long-awaited sequel to his Dawn almost thirty years after its release. From then on, we were treated to an endless spate of films, books and video games featuring the living dead. It finally came to a head when Brad Pitt was cast in the PG:13-rated World War Z and someone decided that fusing teen romance melodrama with zombies in Warm Bodies was a good idea.
The Walking Dead first aired toward the end of this craze in 2010, yet it's still going strong. It has the advantage of being based on beloved comic series still in production, and one of its greatest appeals is its cliffhanger-heavy soap opera approach to a zombie apocalypse. At the dawn of its seventh season, viewers are no longer intrigued by the concept of how society would function after it's plagued by zombies or how killing zombies with melee weapons is more efficient than using guns. No, people are still watching The Walking Dead because they want to see who's going to survive, who's going to hook up and which beloved comic book characters will finally make their debut.
The show is completely self-aware of this addicted following and takes advantage of it. By the second season, the show runners decided to devote the first half of the season to the disappearance of a young girl. That wasn't so bad, as it allowed for much story and character development while the cast convened with another set of survivors on a farm. The clash and eventual bonding of these two groups was important and fun to watch, so when the girl finally turned up, there was a satisfying resolution.
By the third season, a new trend developed. The plot was centered on the group taking over a prison, and a growing tension with developed community called Woodbury. This tension was not built in a roller coaster fashion. Instead, there would be back to back episodes with very little plot development interspersed with a lone episode (usually a premier or finale) in which too much happens within the hour time slot. New characters would be introduced and given more development than the primary cast only to be killed soon after. Worst of all, the long-awaited showdown which had been brewing for almost a year didn't even happen by the third season's conclusion. The writers found it more profitable to postpone the bloodbath viewers had been craving until halfway through the next season.
This trend of postponing the action for inconsequential, barely related drama cooled somewhat over the next season and a half. The show was still teasing viewers with the hint of a favorite character's possible demise, but it felt justified since the group was split in several different factions, so it wasn't terribly annoying when the focus would shift to a new character just after a cliffhanger episode. There were plenty of different subplots to develop within season 4 and 5, so this made the action all the more interesting and rewarding when it would happen. It seemed the show had finally found a balance.
This changed in Season 6, when the survivors established itself at the Alexandra Safe Zone, a haven in which they still remain in the comic series. At this point, the show's next logical move to follow the comic story would be to introduce its primary antagonist, Negan. However, since the show was dominating the ratings at this point, the creators decided they needed to create a season's worth of drama before bringing Negan into the fold. This is problematic, since there's very little that can happen when the group finally settles into their destined home base. Walkers can attack and people can come and go. That's about it.
At this point, a culture had finally surfaced on the internet surrounding the show. People would be scouring for spoilers on Facebook or requesting that their friends refrain from spoiling the plot. This sort of buzz was the bread and butter of the show at this point, and so the writers decided instead of writing an engaging plot, they would write episodes specifically centered around teasing a character's death. This culminated in the show's worst offense, in my opinion. The creators decided to produce a farfetched episode in which series favorite Glenn is clearly implied to have died, or so it appeared. The episode was intentionally directed to make his relatively ambiguous, and his survival was ridiculously explained after three or four weeks of keeping the viewers waiting for a resolution.
When I finally learned that Glenn had survived, I didn't even care by that point. The writers had just wasted the viewers' time with their teasing, following it with three episodes worth of story that seemed completely inconsequential in comparison. No one cared what was happening on the show with Glenn's life hanging on the line, and it was a bad move to follow the cliffhanger with episodes of such slow pacing with no substantial plot development. This is when I realized the writers weren't even trying to come up with a decent, engaging story line anymore. They knew we were invested in the characters and started to write episodes specifically for the purpose of screwing with the audience rather than telling an interesting story.
Ironically, this focus on stimulating viewers' reaction provoked an adverse one from me. Who wants to watch a show that isn't even trying to be good anymore? It had finally reached a point where it was pandering to its following, which ultimately where the line is drawn between good art and assembly-line entertainment. It's where innovation ends and monotony ensues. The show that had once intrigued me with the idea of such varied people working together after the world ends had finally turned into a game of "guess who dies next"?
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