The Walking Dead Spinoff Announcements Are Killing The Final Season’s Buzz
After 12 years and nearly 200 episodes, AMC will soon offer its conclusion to The Walking Dead
The zombie drama premiered on Halloween 2010 and drew five million viewers. That number will triple over the next few years before losing momentum over the last half of its 10+ seasons on TV. Amid perhaps dubious calls to the writers’ room and an increasingly fragmented audience scattered across countless streaming services, The Walking Dead has been bleeding viewers since season 5, from a peak of 17 million to only two million viewers weekly in season 11.
However, the network has big plans for the world of history, going so far as to call it the Walking Dead Universe (TWDU). But as viewers continue to jump ship during the final hours of the show, ironically, the biggest fans are caught in the crossroads of weird marketing decisions. The Walking Dead has several spin-offs, and chances are fans are planning to try them all, even if they don’t want to know about them at the moment.
Note: This article discusses potential spoilers for The Walking Dead. If you haven’t heard about the show’s spin-offs yet, consider yourself forewarned.
Arguably, the four most important characters in The Walking Dead era after Rick Grimes are Daryl, Carol, Negan, and Maggie. Three of them have been around since the first two seasons, while Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) – a fan favorite – first appeared in Season 6. . So why, when half of the last season has not aired yet, so I and two million other hangers-on already know that these four will survive, whatever the series finale is?
In case you missed it,
AMC has loudly and proudly announced several spin-offs for The Walking Dead in addition to the two we’ve already seen in the premiere, Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: World Beyond. One of the three spin-offs after the main series (four if you count the Rick Grimes movies we’re supposed to see someday) will be an anthology, which is a fun idea and leaves the writers free to travel outside of the US or possibly respond. some drawn-out questions, like what happened to Heath?
But the other two spin-offs can only be described as officially sanctioned spoilers from the network’s marketing side. Daryl and Carol are getting their own spin-off in an as-yet-untitled series, while Maggie and Negan head north to New York City for the Isle of the Dead.
For dedicated fans, this means that the main characters of the story
Are guaranteed to be protected by the plot until the end of the series. Imagine if we knew that Jon Snow, Dani, Arya, and Sansa would get their own series after Game of Thrones ended, or if we knew back in 2010 that Sawyer and Hurley would get a spin-off after Lost. This kind of information hurts a show like The Walking Dead, where the stakes of life and death are often the driving force behind the drama. Why would my heart race the next time Daryl gets grabbed by a few walkers? We know how it ends. He survives. AMC told us about it in press releases, tweets, and on their fan talk show Talking Dead.
I understand that I want to keep the momentum for TWDU after the end of the main series, but I think you can do it in several ways, and instead, AMC has chosen a way that pays little attention to the dwindling number of diehards like me. With viewership dropping almost every episode for five years, it’s hard to see what the solution might be to cling to old characters who might turn new eyes away. as well as ruin the ongoing final episodes for a few superfans of the series.
Nowadays, everyone wants to have their own shared universe of history.
Marvel has mastered it. DC is trying. Even video game companies like Remedy have set the stage for some exciting crossovers that bring the series together into one all-encompassing saga. There’s a lot of money to be made creating a shared world that encourages fans to go deeper and stay longer, so it’s hard to resent AMC for trying it with something like The Walking Dead. On paper, this works great. Supposedly, the entire world has been affected by a zombie plague much like Thanos’s Snap that has engulfed the entire Earth.
