The Walking Dead is very well-known for making big swings, killing off key characters, and changing storylines from Robert Kirkman's beloved comic series, much to Kirkman's delight.
At Annecy, Kirkman recently revealed that one of his biggest frustrations with The Walking Dead TV show didn't come from those big swings, major deaths, or changes from the comics. It was what happened after making those changes and trying to find a way to include key moments from the comics when the character was gone.
Here's what Kirkman explained, via Deadline:
"One of the things I thought was the coolest thing about the comics was you never knew what was going to happen next and it bugged me there was this source material [in the TV show] where you could kind of get a roadmap of what was coming. And so I thought it would be cool to change that stuff. And we did change a lot of big things in The Walking Dead. As you get into later seasons, you have this hodgepodge of trying to take stories that work for characters that were still alive in the comics but were dead in the show. It becomes tedious and frustrating.”
It's no secret that Kirkman was all for keeping things exciting and not necessarily following the path laid out by the comics. It gets tricky, though, when you kill off characters like Dale (Jeffrey DeMunn), Andrea (Laurie Holden), and others much earlier than fans expect, and you have to find a way to make the great scenes and moments from later in the series happen to different characters. It just gets jumbled or watered down.
The Walking Dead isn't the only adaptation facing this problem
This is not a problem that just happened with The Walking Dead, though. We're seeing it across all of these major adaptations. Game of Thrones ran into this big time. House of the Dragon, which just had its season 3 premiere recently, is struggling with it right now. When you make changes early in the series and things happen differently, it can mess up these major moments that fans of the original source material are expecting.
It's the butterfly effect, basically. Characters aren't where they are supposed to be, or maybe a character was killed off when they were alive in the source material. Or, you have a character who is alive in the story but was killed off in the source material. It all just gets confusing, and the writers and creators have to make really tough decisions about how to move forward.
Honestly, I've never been a person that has a hard time viewing the source material and the adaptation through a different lens. Sure, it gets annoying sometimes, but I tend to treat the stories as two entirely different things. Like, The Walking Dead comics are a different story than The Walking Dead TV series. I try my best to appreciate both as different art forms. Still, it gets hard to do that when there are so many emotions involved, lives on the line, and all of that.
The Walking Dead made a lot bad changes from the comics, but some of those changes paid off
Ultimately, The Walking Dead did make a lot of key mistakes veering away from the source material that basically forced the writers into some tough spots. Andrea's death is a big example of that. You can even say Glenn's death, too. Killing off Carl (Chandler Riggs) was absolutely insane at the time and in hindsight.
But, then, some of those changes worked out completely. Norman Reedus, who might be the franchise's biggest star, plays a character, Daryl Dixon, who wasn't in the comics at all.
Can you imagine The Walking Dead without Daryl? I don't know if I want to watch that show. He's such a big part of the series and the franchise as a whole. Kirkman admitted he was trying to kill Daryl the whole time, too.
The bottom line is that it's just really challenging to bring a show like The Walking Dead to life. Sometimes, the choices worked out, and sometimes, they didn't, but it's clear that they had a hard time figuring out what to do after some of those bold choices and changes from the comics were made.
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