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Why The Walking Dead Getting Stale and Needs To Change

By Josh Hill

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The Walking Dead is one of the most popular shows on television, but a lot of that has to do with one character and some are starting to fear that the show might be getting stale. 

Fans of The Walking Dead are in a weird lull period right now where there is a lot of time before the actual show comes back but the wait for the spinoff series Fear The Walking Dead is right around the corner from happening.

With the premiere of Fear The Walking Dead so close, some fans are starting to re-evaluate where The Walking Dead has come from and where it’s going in terms of the quality of the series. It’s not that The Walking Dead is a bad show, it’s just that it might be getting stale — which is a bad thing.

Is The Walking Dead Getting Stale?

It sure is. That seems harsh, but there’s only so much walking and talking that we can endure before the show starts to spin it’s wheels. How many times are we going to have to watch Sasha lay in a grave of walkers, struggling with PTSD before it’s explained. It’s little things like that which are building up to be a big problem for the series.

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Let’s also address the fact that Rick has gone to the brink of being crazy, lingered, and then come back from it only to have the group totally not make a big deal out of it. How many times is that going to happen before we roll our eyes so hard that we go blind with boredom.

Look, The Walking Dead is a massively popular show, but a majority of that has to do with one character — Daryl Dixon. Fans are literally so rabid about their obsession with Daryl that the writers are terrified to kill him off. That might be overstating things, but the fact that he’s lingered around for so long, or always seems to get out of danger unscathed is pretty unfathomable.

There have been hints that the show is moving away from this sort of droll repetition, as it looked like Daryl might be in serious danger when he was in the car with Aaron. But of course, he was rescued at the last minute and wasn’t ever really in any danger at all.

That’s the problem with this show, as it’s either Rick walking around being crazy, a bunch of people standing in a field for an entire season or people walking.

It’s called The Walking Dead, but let’s not take the title that literally.

So Why Watch It If You Think It Sucks So Bad?

I don’t hate The Walking Dead. This frustration is coming from a place not unlike a parent disappointed in their child. Look, this is a series that is bound to spin it’s wheels at times. That doesn’t make it bad, but it’s also not an excuse to get lazy. There’s a reason the episode where Tyreese dies angered so many fans.

It wasn’t that the show killed off Tyreese, or that it got artsy and dedicated an entire episode to killing a character.  It was that we’ve seen so many plodding episodes in the past — or in the case of Season 3, an entire season of plodding — that is was just frustrating.

That’s a shame too, because the episode was actually really solid, but episodes where the plot isn’t moved forward are just hard to take in, unless they’re done sparingly.

‘The Fly’ episode of Breaking Bad is controversial to some for this very reason, but it was an episode that was so far out of left field from what we were used to that it worked. Having every single episode be plodding and full of character development that is so fiercely on-the-nose as some Walking Dead episodes have been is a bad strategy.

And then, when the series actually teases real development — like with Daryl and his past — they put it off like it never happened.

There’s hope for the future though. It looks like Negan is going to play a role in the future, The Wolves are coming into play and the show might actually grow some balls and kill off a major character, not just a secondary character we all like because they don’t have enough screen time to piss us off.

Kill Rick. Kill Carl. Kill Daryl. Kill someone that is going to pivot the direction of the show, because we can only watch people walking around before it’s us who become the undead.

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