The Walking Dead comic is at an end—AMC’s show should be next

When The Walking Dead first aired on AMC way back in October of 2010, it was a fresh and horrifying take on the zombie genre. Season 2 was slower, and mostly featured Rick and the gang taking shelter at Hershel’s farm and basically doing nothing but find ways to kill each other.

Fast-forward to now, and the show is still slowly shuffling toward parts unknown with seemingly no end in sight. The hero, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), is no longer part of the show, nor is his son Carl (Chandler Riggs). The show no longer has much in common with the source material, the comic series by Robert Kirkman. Sure, the villains are largely the same, but the with the main cast changing rapidly — Maggie (Lauren Cohan), another popular character, has also vanished — we’re a far cry from Kirkman’s original vision.

And what we have hasn’t been winning people over. Ratings have been plunging for a while, and I personally don’t blame people for bailing. The show recently brought on the Whisperers, one of the most terrifying villains from the comics, but gave them a minimal amount of screentime. As their leader, Alpha, British actress Samantha Morton sports one of the worst southern accents I have ever had the displeasure of hearing:

Anyway, with all this, you’d think The Walking Dead would be on its way out…but AMC is currently busy filming season 10. The Whisperers will return, bad accents and all, but after our heroes deal with them, what’s next? In the comics, there’s another story arc about a group called the Commonwealth, but it’s harder to keep a show alive than it is a comic series, and it’s really starting to look like AMC might be better off throwing in the towel.

I say this soon after Kirkman, who’d been writing The Walking Dead comic for16 years and 193 issues, abruptly ended it. In a final letter to fans, he wrote:

"As I worked to come up with ways to expand the story, none of it felt right. Everything felt like an unnecessary detour. It was, for lack of better word, filler. The harder I tried to come up with new places to go, the clearer it was to me that this is what the story needed … it needed to end."

Love it or hate it, The Walking Dead has reached the point where the stories are all beginning to melt together. Our heroes meet a new villain, they try reaching out with kindness, it doesn’t work, war starts, and the good guys eventually win. On TV, The Walking Dead has felt like filler for awhile.

None of this means that AMC is planning to end the show. In fact, there are all sorts of spinoffs being planned. But it’s starting to feel like the network has lost touch with what the fans want.

Take Fear the Walking Dead, the first Walking Dead spinoff. That show was supposed to be a prequel to The Walking Dead, and in its first two or three seasons, it was great. But now, the show has been turned into a shell of its former self. Once again, the heroes trust anyone and everyone they meet, even if it means they get slaughtered, until eventually they come out the other side.

That’s a screengrab from this week’s episode of Fear, where the gang finds a hot air balloon and uses it to save their friends, but predictably, it runs out of fuel and crashes to earth.

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