That tease, combined with his death in spite of the “hard left turn” promise, seemed to demonstrate at least a slightly sadistic streak on the part of the writer’s room. Season 6 itself had already tricked viewers into thinking Glenn died before his time early in the season, fans spent weeks thinking Glenn had been ravaged by zombies when in fact, the show eventually revealed he’d hidden under a dumpster. This did not turn out to mean Glenn was safe instead, he died alongside Abraham-a character whose own death had already been delayed by burying a gay character instead. There was also the fact that Gimple had promised (though with careful wording) that the events of the comics (that is, Negan killing Glenn) would not happen exactly as they originally had. Instead, after a season’s worth of teasing, the show punted the gory scene to the next year-a forced cliffhanger that seemed to signal that the show did not trust its fans to show up without a guarantee of blood sacrifice. It didn’t help that most fans expected the scene to happen during The Walking Dead’s Season 6 finale. One could say it started around Season 2, when fans spent almost a full season bored out of our minds waiting for Rick Grimes and the gang to find a little girl named Sophia-only to find her zombified in a barn.īut it was that moment in the Season 7 premiere, when Negan brutalized Steven Yeun’s Glenn Rhee and Michael Cudlitz’s Abraham Ford with a baseball bat after a season of build-up, that seemed to cannibalize the goodwill many fans had for the series in record time. One could say it was there from the very beginning, as the series seemed to kill off a seemingly endless stream of Black actors whose white peers often seemed to emerge unscathed. In truth, however, the cynicism in the show’s writing had begun to show much earlier than that. That vow would later seem cynical when Glenn got his skull bashed in anyway. In Season 6, fans were worried about Glenn-the character Yeun made a fan favorite, who died around that time in the comics’ story-but Gimple promised a “ hard left turn” from his source material. (It would have to, given that Carl-who ends the comics by reading a book to his daughter, Andrea-has been dead on the show since Season 8.)įor all the years The Walking Dead has been on air, its producers have been forced to come up with endless synonyms for the “remix” to keep comic-reading fans from getting bored. As always, however, AMC’s Scott Gimple has promised that The Walking Dead show will not take all its cues from the comics the show’s ending, he told Entertainment Weekly, will be a “remix” of the original. Spoiler blogs abounded, and the show-like its contemporary, Game of Thrones-was monitored so closely that it (like Game of Thrones) wound up shooting alternative endings for what became Steven Yeun’s now notorious death scene just to prevent it from getting spoiled.Ĭomic readers have known one ending to The Walking Dead’s story since 2019, when Robert Kirkman’s comic upon which the show is based came to a close. (Remember swine flu?) The series became a massive hit, even in spite of a dismal second season, and for a while, TWD was inescapable. In stumbled The Walking Dead, which premiered one year after the H1N1 pandemic. And streaming had only just begun eating cable television’s lunch. Zombies” games were an epidemic on the nerdy corners of college campuses (I say this as someone who not only played but moderated these games, thankyouverymuch!), and watching TV while also feverishly chatting about the minute-by-minute drama online was still a relatively novel concept. Books like The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z lined the shelves of Barnes and Noble, and the undead had overrun the movies, too, with releases like 28 Days Later, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, Resident Evil, and Zombieland. By the time The Walking Dead made its modest six-episode debut on Halloween in 2010, the TV-watching public was ravenous for zombie content.
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