The Walking Dead is one of the best TV shows of the last two decades, but not all 11 seasons lived up to the super high bar of the show's first few seasons. In fact, after season 5, The Walking Dead, which is one of the best seasons of the series, was never as good again.
There's nothing more challenging in TV than climbing to the top of the mountain as one of the best shows and then maintaining that quality season after season. The Walking Dead achieved incredible highs during the first few seasons of the show, but inevitably, a dropoff was going to happen. And, it did after the fifth season of the series.
Why The Walking Dead season 5 was so good
The Walking Dead season 5 is the perfect culmination of everything that happened in the previous four seasons, all of the lessons learned, and people lost. Terminus presented Rick's group with an immediate problem to solve, while Alexandria gave Rick and his group a new lease on life after everything that happened at the prison and the horrors of Terminus. As we all know, it was no safe haven.
The group had to come to terms with what had happened in the past and the mistakes they made in order to move forward, which led to so many disagreements on what life should be like and look like in the future. To me, I always liked The Walking Dead when the group was able to settle down for a period before the inevitable happened.
The Walking Dead season 5 was the last season that the key players, Rick, Glenn, Daryl, Maggie, Carol, and others, were still together and still working toward a common goal, for the most part. Everything started to change after season 5.
Alexandria showed fans what could be and what a future could look like. They had everything they needed to maintain and to survive. It wasn't good enough, though.
From a narrative perspective, though, The Walking Dead probably should have ended with season 5. There was no way that would happen from a financial perspective, of course. There was still story to be told, too. It wasn't all bad after season 5.
Still, if AMC could do it all over again, Alexandria would have been the perfect place to end The Walking Dead and launch so many spinoffs. You had so many major characters still alive at that point. The group could have split off naturally after Alexandria fell, but they chose to bring in Negan, and the rest is history.
Obviously, the biggest show on TV during that time was never going to do that, but it would have been revolutionary to abandon the story from the graphic novels and do something even bigger with the characters.
The Walking Dead chose shock value over story after season 5
It's well-documented where The Walking Dead went wrong after season 5. For me, the show chose shock value over story. Instead of earning its character deaths and wrapping up character arcs in ways that make sense to the story, The Walking Dead chose to kill off some of its beloved characters, like Glenn and Carl, in really frustrating ways.
That's the easy explanation, but I think that fatigue also played a big part in The Walking Dead's demise after season 5. The cast, crew, and creative team, for the most part, had been grinding out 16-episode seasons for three full years at that point. I know TV is just different now, but that's so many episodes in such a short span. It's obvious that the cast was tired, but it also takes time to write good stories. The Walking Dead kept going back to the same well for these discussions of morality in the apocalypse that just got, for lack of a better word, boring.
Once fans left, there were only a few reasons to come back to the franchise. When the big names started walking away in later seasons, including Andrew Lincoln, Lauren Cohan, Steven Yeun, and Danai Gurira, it was hard to keep fans around.
The Walking Dead season 9 was the last good season, but it wasn't better than season 5
After three rough seasons in a row (6, 7, and 8), The Walking Dead was able to right the ship in the ninth season with the introduction of the Whisperers.
The Whisperers are obviously a big change of pace from all of the other groups in the series. We'd had cannibals, villains, and more, but the Whisperers, and their whole vibe, were just different from the other groups that we saw up to that point. Alpha (Samantha Morton) was also just a different kind of villain compared to Negan, The Governor, and some of the others.
For me, it's hard to say if The Walking Dead season 9 is actually that good in comparison to the early seasons or if it was just a breath of fresh air after the war with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). I know fans love Negan, but I just really felt like that story lasted about a season or two too long.
But, The Walking Dead definitely got the series back on track in some regard. It wasn't perfect, and many fans had already bailed at that point, but it was good enough to keep the series interesting and give it a boost through the last three seasons. Still, the show never achieved the highs of season 5 after that epic season