Netflix just paid $500 million to keep The Walking Dead (and its spinoffs) shambling along for another five years.
I’ve been beating this dead horse for over a decade, and I’m not stopping now: The Walking Dead is one of the most overrated television shows ever made.
That opinion probably isn’t going to win me many friends, but hear me out.
As a lifelong horror fan, comic book reader, and zombie obsessive, I couldn’t have been more excited when AMC announced it was adapting Robert Kirkman’s masterpiece. The comic remains one of my favorite ongoing horror series ever published. Every issue felt dangerous. Every death mattered. Every new character changed the landscape. Most importantly, it always felt like the story was moving toward something.
Then the TV series happened.
Sure, the first season had Frank Darabont behind the camera, and I think a lot of us convinced ourselves we loved it because we wanted to love it. Instead, I found it surprisingly cheap-looking, oddly lifeless, and nowhere near as tense as the comic that inspired it.
I kept waiting for it to find its footing.
Season after season, the formula never really changed. Premiere? Great. Finale? Usually pretty good. Everything in between? Endless walking. Endless exposition. Characters standing around talking in the woods. Long stretches where almost nothing happened.
The apocalypse never felt authentic to me. The sets often looked small. The costumes rarely sold the passage of time. The world never felt lived in. And, perhaps most disappointing of all, I never thought the writing came close to capturing what made Kirkman’s comic so compelling.
I tapped out around Season 4. Apparently, I wasn’t alone. Viewership eventually began dropping as more and more people seemed to realize they had invested years into a show that kept promising payoff while endlessly spinning its wheels.
And yet… Here we are.
Netflix just spent half a billion dollars to make The Walking Dead one of the biggest streaming destinations in the world.
Maybe it’ll find another generation of fans. Maybe millions of people will binge all 371 episodes and every spinoff.
Me?
I’d rather spend that time discovering one of the thousands of incredible horror movies, comics, or TV series that don’t require hundreds of hours to get interesting.
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