Fallen Franchises: The Walking Dead

hello everybody I'm your Posh prick and today I'm talking about brain s [Music] yeah with Halloween in full swing in the final season set to wrap in November I figured I should take the opportunity to go over a fallen franchise that just refuses to stay falling adapted from the comic series of the same name by Robert Kirkman which ran from 2003 to 2019 The Walking Dead got it starts around Peak TV time rubbing shoulders with the likes of Game of Thrones Breaking Bad and Dexter kind of a good metaphor really The Walking Dead survived long enough to become a shambling brain dead husk of its former self nice the show revolves around a colorful cast of characters in the aftermath of a major zombie or sorry Walker apocalypse the series Central protagonist Deputy Rick Grimes leads his group across the state of Georgia to find Sanctuary from the Walkers and other less friendly survivors [Music] [Music] like a lot of shows things don't stay that simple for long characters die locations change show Runners get chucked off you know how it goes but before we get to lobbing off rotting Walker heads it's time to take a look at where this viral outbreak of the show began and it goes without saying spoilers ahead production of The Walking Dead was originally spearheaded by Frank Darabont of Shawshank Redemption and Green Mile Fame the robot came across the comic book Series in 2005 and approached Kirkman to do an adaptation before pitching its first to NBC and then AMC therabont developed an executive produced the first season which received glowing reviews from audiences and critics alike and also earned AMC its most watched series premiere of all time I'd like to go into more detail regarding darabon's involvement and departure but then we'd get into spoiler territory for the rest of this video so I'm just gonna move on throughout its 11 season Run The Walking Dead verd steadily away from the comic of its origin plenty of recognizable characters appear but certain plot points and story beats deviate from how they go in the source material that kind of artistic licenses to be expected from any adaptation some changes were well received others not so much but we'll get into that more in a minute all in all despite the wide dips and valleys that the show went down in terms of quality The Walking Dead remains one of the more ambitious Ventures and the zombie genre fundamentally the show's iteration of Walkers don't deviate much from your bog standard zombie but the fact that Kirkman and the showrunners were able to weave a half decent post-apocalyptic world out of what I consider one of the least interesting movie Monsters is an impressive feat people forget now but back in 2010 the zombie craze was all over the place The Walking Dead came out right as this trend peaked and even spearheaded it in a lot I mean we had plenty of zombie stories before the 2010s Sean of the Dead 28 Days Later etc etc but nothing's stuck in our cultural lexicon quite as hard as The Walking Dead after this we got The Last of Us Warm Bodies World War Z everyone wanted to get on that zombie train after the show made its Mark in many ways The Walking Dead is a good metric to judge just how much people do or don't care about Zombies anymore The Craze came and went but The Walking Dead is still going in one form or another that could either highlight the show and the genre's resilience or the Studio's refusal to accept that this is a trend that they can't ride the coattails of anymore at least until the last of us show comes out and blows up my theory but that's for a later date all in all I'd say that the strengths of the early Walking Dead seasons were a matter of character and pacing season one is still the high point which the show was never able to recapture it had everything complex characters interesting themes Strong World building not to mention that the pacing was Leaps and Bounds ahead of what the later show managed but in the later Show's defense Eva even the worst seasons had some golden moments here and there as dry as season 2 was that reveal of Sophia in the barn chills Seasons five through seven slowed things down a turn but we got Negan and the saviors God damn it and they were some of the best villains in any zombie story in short even at its worst The Walking Dead always found ways of clawing back the audience's attention so the first red flags actually popped up way back in 2011 after darabont's departure and I say departure in kind of a vagueish way because people weren't really sure what was going on at the time AMC announced the showrunner's departure just a few days after Comic-Con 2011 where darabot helped to promote the series everyone was left in the dark I mean this was darabont's baby he was the one who pitched the whole thing to AMC now all of a sudden he's leaving what's the deal the reigning Theory at the time was that Darabont couldn't adjust the TV production schedules and left because of the stress but this was soon debunked as The Hollywood Reporter revealed that AMC had actually fired him according to reports problems had plagued the second season with Darabont and AMC having dispute over budget cuts and other executive decisions over the show's production upon his firing at neither Darabont AMC nor the entire cast of The Walking Dead discussed the matter which to me screams red flags all of this came to a head in 2013 when daraban on the creative artists agency sued AMC citing a breach of contract according to the lawsuit AMC allegedly underpaid Darabont using legal loopholes through vertical integration to avoid paying him his agreed share of the profits to summarize a whole load of legal jargon that I can't be bothered to sift through AMC went back on contractual agreements to divert production of The Walking Dead to a third party instead deciding to produce it themselves this allowed AMC to make it look as if the Walking Dead was running at a loss thereby avoiding having to pay Darabont his fair amount to give an example in 2012 AMC claimed that the show was running at a 49 million dollar deficit despite the fact that it was one of the most popular series on broadcast television at that time things got even thornier when derabot's lawyers claimed that the man was fired before the second season so that AMC could avoid paying him then things got even worse when similar loss suits were filed by fellow crew members including Robert Kirkman Gail Ann Hurd Charles eggley Glenn mazara and David Alpert all of whom claimed that AMC had screwed them out of money through vertical integration much the same way that they had with Darabont AMC settled the darabon lawsuit in 2021 with 200 million dollars paid to Darabont and the creative artist agency along with any future royalty payments while the latter suit from other showrunners and producers were dismissed by court order regardless of this later decision though this entire legal situation doesn't paint AMC in the best light again I'm no lawyer I don't know all the ins and outs but this all screams like a blatant attempt by big Media company to screw over one of their creatives because they just didn't want to cut into their profits Darabont came up with the idea for the show worked with the guy who wrote the comic pitched it to AMC worked his ass off on the first and as far as I'm concerned best season and it went on to be one of the most popular shows in TV history so with numbers like that naturally it makes total sense to screw over the guy who put together one of your biggest cash cows am I right this is a tragically common occurrence in this industry Darabont got the ball rolling in 2010 but within a year he's booted off of his own project which in turn was co-opted and taken over by the studio I mean who knows what might have happened with Rick and Carl and everyone else at Darabont stayed on and been allowed to direct the Show how he liked as it stands though following darabont's departure the show's quality veered wildly through the seasons season two on the Farmers near universally considered the worst with the strong pacing and interesting characterization from the first season markedly absent the show regained some steam with the introduction to Michonne and the governor and then kept things going pretty solidly throughout the prison Arc then things took another dip with the whole Alexandria storyline then got a little momentum back with Negan and the saviors and then leveled out with the whisperers before going back to boredom town with the Commonwealth story arc along this flip-floppy period we saw several writing choices which were not only questionable or just downright contradictory but actively left audiences confused and angry Laurie's character was despised early on and only seemed to get worse as things progressed Carol went from one of the most beloved characters on the show to one of the dumbest during the Whisperer storyline I'm just gonna whisper this to all of the aspiring writers out there you don't need to portray grief in a character by making them stupid but easily the dumbest decision at least to me was killing off Carl Carl the heart and soul The Optimist the hopeful one who was meant to succeed Rick as the main character the kid who lost his damned eye and still came out wishing for the best why in the hell would you kill him off can't we just have one optimistic character not get punished for the mortal sin of being an optimist moments like this make you realize lies the spotty inconsistent nature of the show's writing and also makes the audience aware of the hand of the author I mean this decision was Daenerys burning King's Landing levels of stupid for me it sucked me out of the moment because it was a writing decision which meant nothing and didn't benefit the story or the characters this brings me to a fundamental problem with any show or franchise that lasts as long as this inevitably it's going to run out of steam it happened with Supernatural it happened with The X-Files and The Walking Dead ran out of steam seasons ago without getting the message veering into a slight tangent here but a common problem I find with zombie stories is repetitiveness there's only so many directions that you can take this particular category of monster and even then your options are quite limited you can make them slow and stupid or fast and angry Cobble together a colorful cast of characters sprinking some Bleak message about the nature of humanity following an apocalypse viral outbreak and boom you've got 90 of stories that involve zombies out there it's not like vampires or werewolves where you've got room to do different things and different interpretations with zombies what you see is all you get they aren't intelligent they travel and attack in hordes you kill them by aiming for the head and there's usually no way to cure them 28 days slash weeks later World War Z they all can share the same basic structure and if you draw that structure out for too long your audience is just gonna get bored this was less true in The Walking Dead's Beginnings Darabont was aware of the pitfalls of this genre and worked to make sure that the story remained fresh part of that was done by tightening up the number of episodes in the first season at the start all we had were six installments which kept the pacing quick and consistent like a lot of American shows I'd argue that The Walking Dead suffered from stretching itself too thin over too many episodes season 1 knew to stay in the pocket 6 to 10 episodes a season I would argue makes way more sense if you want your pacing to remain concise obviously that's a Nova simplification but with something like The Walking Dead I think it applies unless you're doing a big fantasy epic with dragons and fictional continents and ancient Royal lineages etc etc six to ten episodes is a good time frame to strive for any longer and you're just gonna end up padding the show down and stretching the story out longer than is ideal The Walking Dead became a pitch perfect example of this whether because of showrunner Indulgence or the studio just calculating more episodes equals more views and more ratings having this many episodes in a bleak show about the driest and least interesting type of movie monster out there is just gonna make your audience bored plot lines get stretched out for too long characters end up feeling stale and Hollow or just feel underdeveloped there's not enough weights to this particular kind of story to justify giving it this much air time foreign ultimately the problem with The Walking Dead aside from the legal battles poor Studio management and basic pitfalls of its genre is pure and simple oversaturation the damn thing has lasted way too long to end with any Grace and even with the main show concluding they're still trying to make spin-offs to milk it for all its worth several spin-offs have been promised by The Walking Dead showrunners some of which have paid off others were left on The Cutting Room floor Fear The Walking Dead is one of the more successful ones such to the point that many viewers think it actually outshines the original show that Carol and Daryl spin-off is apparently not happening anymore The Walking Dead movie is still up in the air fundamentally the problem is now and has been for a long time that we just don't care anymore it doesn't really matter how well or poorly executed that The Walking Dead ends I'm not going to care either way we cared when Game of Thrones ended even though it pissed us all off we cared when breaking bad or Better Call Saul ended people were talking about those shows months after they were out I doubt there's going to be anybody talking about The Walking Dead when it finally concludes because like I said it's just overstayed it's welcome I can't predict what would have happened if Darabont stayed on as the lead showrunner but I can't imagine that the quality would have gotten worse than what we've seen maybe he could have ended it on a better note maybe he could have handled some elements from the comics better maybe he wouldn't have killed Carl off sorry that's still my biggest pet peeve all I know is the way the show went and the way AMC handled it anything would have been better than what we got despite its spirited Beginnings The Walking Dead will forever be remembered as yet another franchise which should have known to go out gracefully and stay dead and buried foreign [Music]

Channel: Posh Prick Reviews

Views: 20,397

Keywords: The Walking Dead, Fallen Franchises, Posh Prick Reviews, Rick Grimes, Fear The Walking Dead, Tales of the Walking Dead, Frank Darabont, Daryl Dixon, AMC, Michonne, Negan, Carol

Id: pjz9E3s7HrM

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2022