Like many, I had to remove myself from The Walking Dead’s viewership around the time Negan took his bat to the heads of two long-running characters whose identities and deaths had been relentlessly teased by producers all through the sixth series, and even slightly into the seventh. What had been increasingly obvious for a long time became unignorable: this was a show that had long ago abandoned any thematic interests or narrative purpose in favour of simply devising worse and worse ways for people to die. I almost came back to watch Carl’s death in season eight because, man, I hated that child, but that felt like it would lose me a lot of moral high ground, so I had to settle for merely knowing it was at last done.
The spin-offs began in 2015 with Fear the Walking Dead (which soon got chaotically boring, too). Many others, including anthology series and ones that focus on specific characters, have followed but none has quite caught fire. A lot of hopes have been pinned on the reanimating force of Andrew Lincoln (who starred as the franchise hero Rick Grimes until the ninth series of the original’s eleven) and Danai Gurira (as Michonne, the nonpareil of apocalyptic warriors and the love of Rick’s life) who combine to form the nucleus of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live.
