It's almost easy to forget what a huge sensation The Walking Dead was in the early 2010s. It changed the television landscape and supercharged the zombie phenomenon that had started almost a whole decade before, with a great cast and perfect balance between psychological drama and post-apocalypse horror. Well, the first few seasons at least. The show lost its way at season 4 in my opinion, and I had to stop watching after the season 7 premiere along with millions of other viewers due to the cheap writing and stretched out storylines that were clearly going nowhere. Had a really good run while it lasted though! But the show should've been 5 seasons max in my opinion.
Season 1 is perfect for what it is, 2 also aside from dragging a bit in places, 3 is very solid but doesn't really climax until the mid-season-4 finale. AMC just kept it going for the $ but the viewership keeps going down, so it's fiiiinally ending this year I think? Or next? Who knows or cares, all the original characters aren't even in it anymore I'm pretty sure. But despite all the up and down quality of this series, there are some truly fantastic episodes to be found. You can probably just watch season 1 and call it a day, or anywhere after the best episode of the series, What Happened & What's Going On. I’d say it’s pretty good until season 6 where it starts going downhill, especially after The Same Boat.
My favorite eps: Days Gone Bye, Vatos, What Lies Ahead, Pretty Much Dead Already, Nebraska, 18 Miles Out, Judge Jury & Executioner, Beside the Dying Fire, Seed, Killer Within, Live Bait, Dead Weight, Too Far Gone, No Sanctuary, The Grove, A, What Happened & What's Going On, The Distance, Remember, Conquer, No Way Out, and The Same Boat.
Easy recommendation for zombie-survival fans or fans of the original comic books.
When I saw the beginning montage of people I knew what was gonna come. The couple, the mother, the random dude getting hugged by an extra who walked off trying not to look for recognition of the behind-the-scenes team. And then, yet another lousy speech that would only rile up the most fervent cult-member... and boy did they act like cult-members.
And yet I kept watching.
The episode got a bit better when Ezekiel's character was in view but it balanced dreadfully close to the abyss when the stupid cat and mouse game with nerdy evil Carl look-a-like began. Guess 3 meters isn't that far in zombiepaces ? Oh no, wait, it's 12 meters all of a sudden.
And yet I kept watching.
Upside was Zeke's axe-wielding friend affirming that he is indeed a cool dude. Where's the tiger... don't tell me they'll... Oh it's Carol being bad-ass... Great. "I couldn't stop them"... Besides shooting the tires, shooting them at the start, below the truck, hell throw a grenade for all I care... but no... let's let in slow shambling zombies instead. Oh and shooting in the air, lots of shooting cuz WAR. War is lots of shooting right?
Let's not even start about the chase scene.
Where's the suspense, where's the tension, where's CORRAL, Negan, where's a decent action director and intellect? Where 's the place they got all those bullets from all of a suddon. Where's the creativity and writing that isn't done by 10-year old kids. Again, certain scenes with Ezekiel were good to great and in general the build up and break-down of this character was nicely done but then the show managed to do the lasy thing again and... kill off the tiger. Once more they threw a fan-favorite character "to the lions" and killed it off cuz... it's a bleak world and shocker right?! Game of Thrones did it right? Kill your darlings, guys? Guys? Look a useless unimaginative and unnecessary death of a loved character!
As previous commenters stated: I cared more for the death of this CGI animal than I did any of the 50 idiotic people in Rick's gang. The little kid at the end walking towards a broken Zeke was good but that was most likely built on my soft spot for self-sacrificing underdogs, kids and my own disappointments with, to and from children. The rest was just... drek... again.
And yet I roll my eyes and sigh.
I'm almost done with this show, how many more episodes this season? It'll be the third series I stopped watching voluntarily. There are no characters left I still care about (besides Negan, but he's gonna die anyways right, Ezekiel and his buddy, who are both most likely gonna die before the season's end) and for me it can all just end. I'll watch Fear the Walking Dead instead... that show I rolled my eyes at before it started cause it sounded so derivative... The irony.
This is a weird one that bucks the trends of most of my other show reviews and recommendations. The first 4ish seasons of this show were some of the best seasons to ever appear on television. THEN there is periods of lulls...then greatness...then lulls. Does the greatness come from the lulls and world building? Could the lulls be called fluff and cut out? I don't have the answer to that. I wholeheartedly love this show, but also cannot recommend to anyone to watch it start to finish. My average season review below includes everything (including the lackluster single season spin off). My recommendation is that this is a must see show that you have to get through "Bad Negan".
Average Season Review: 7.96/10 (Includes Tales of the Walking Dead Spin-Off)
Recommendation: Must See (For Post Apocalyptic Drama Fans)
EDIT (After Dead City, Daryl Dixon, & The Ones Who Live)
All three spin-offs were quite solid, progressively better with each one. While The Ones Who Live was never as good as peak Walking Dead, it was darn close. That mini series is a must see for any Walking Dead fan as it hits all things wonderful about this world in essentially self contained episodes!
Average Season Review: 8/10
"The Walking Dead" started as a short but intense series of episodes that somehow managed to give back dignity to zombie flicks. Sure it might have had its clichés (God, that love triangle), yet the gritty and semi-realistic tone was not something that obvious in this kind of production. Still, who would have thought it was doomed to become one of the longest beaten dead horses in recent TV history? My experience ended with the fourth season, and I can't believe that was less than 30% of the whole thing. There was no particular event that triggered me, but I just naturally stopped thinking about it. Coming back to the show just felt like booking my next visit at the proctologist.
The second season had already started getting slower and thicker, which is understandable as we got twice the number of episodes. I liked that they were making the show about the people more than the zombies, but despite all the time spent on drama, we never got significant character development. Most of the time it would just be people going over their traumas. It was good that some people started to step into the gray zone, but the writers usually prefer to depict characters as either heroes or villains. The day you are evil, you would start doing the craziest things for pretty much no reason.
The third season had a very underwhelming finale, but the pacing throughout was pretty good. I liked how they kept switching the focus away from the zombies, with the collapse of all institutions turning humans into a much bigger threat. The villains could use more complexity though, sometimes they just feel like caricatures that need to act evil at all costs. I didn't expect some characters to get killed off already, which is great news as I hated most of them. Still, the subplot with Rick going crazy was absolutely ridiculous.
The fourth season felt so long that by the end I thought I had mistakenly watched two seasons. It’s not atrocious, but out of 16 episodes, maybe just a couple felt worth watching (8 and 15, maybe 12?). The rest just dragged on for too long and didn't add anything to what we had already seen.
I'm watching through Netflix so I'm stuck on season 9. This show started out great. It got real boring in the middle up until Neegan showed up. Once he was taken down it became boring again. The meandering story grinds your interest down. It becomes so predictable too. Every time something good happens or a character experiences happiness it's solely to contrast impending doom. Season 9 could not have been worse. What did they do with Rick? Seriously, how do you write a main character out like that? I can get behind a time skip, it can be fun to see how a future can play out. Two time skips in one season where Maggie and a whole damn war collapsing the kingdom get written out off screen is some terrible bullshit. I can't wait to see how they screw up season ten.
Edit: I've now finished it. What a waste of time. Because the spinoffs continue the story in several branches (three is it?), there is no real end to this festering corpse of a show. Watch season 1 and stop if you value your time. If you don't value your time, watch until Megan twirls his bat around then end it. If want to waste your life watching crap like I did then there's one or two good things by the end.
Review by tING tONYBlockedParent2019-09-21T06:06:13Z
Ok so this show was just DOPE when it came out with season 1 years ago. The cast and the onscreen chemistry was fantastic. They spent a lot of time building the relationships between the titular characters, slowly unfolding each ones traits and as a result we as viewer's have grown to love and have our own favorite. Now I get it that a post apocalyptic show having a happily ever after ending is ignorant at the least but having the core characters murdered in such a brutal manner just to shock the audience is a cheap tactic that has very evidently backfired on this show.
It averaged 11 million viewers in its prime, and now apparently viewership has fallen to a mere 4 million.
A minor deviance from the novel series is understandable especially when the author hasn't finished his work (like in GoT), but the script writers of this show decided to take matters into their hands, so much so that the graphic novel and the TV series at its finished product will look nothing alike.
Personally, the show is watchable till midway of season 6. If there's anybody planning to watch this now, heed my advice, as soon as the show starts to mention a character called Negan, that's your signal to quit watching.
From Season 7 starts the downward spiral; be it the declining viewership, an unrecognizable atmosphere, the fractured aimless plot (as the groups get split up), and a plethora of new unwanted characters being introduced in the hopes that the audience will be willing to let go of the show's core characters.
. The show has had a different director for every season. And each one gives their own little idiotic spin on it(especially towards the later seasons). As a result, what was once a comprehensive plot has now dwindled into a purposeless cocktail of irrelevant characters having no tangible objective, heading towards what has to be a bottomless pit of doom. It's simply gone beyond the point of any redemption.