The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live Offered Satisfying Closure for a Lapsed TWD Fan
I walked away from The Walking Dead in 2016 and never looked back but am glad I had the chance to revisit this world with the Rick & Michonne spinoff.
Spoiler warning: I try not to be super specific on what occurs, but there are general spoilers for The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live’s entire season below (and more specific ones for the first two episodes).
Remember when The Walking Dead was just insanely popular? There was a time when it was the most watched series on television each week. It was the kind of hit series few can dream of and the fact that so many people were tuning into a dark and violent horror show about zombies, based on a black and white comic book, was pretty remarkable.
But then it kept going. And going. Creatively, the show had some pretty massive highs and lows even during its early years, but by and large still was undeniably compelling and involving. However, the quality began to noticeably drop as time went on and the frustrating aspects began to notably rise and, like many, by Season 7 in 2016, I was officially checked out. I’ve seen many name Negan’s brutal murder of Glenn and Abraham as their tap out moment, but I got a bit further than that - I believe the halfway point of the season in December 2016, as the show went on hiatus for a couple of months, was when I ended my time with The Walking Dead. When it came back, in February 2017, I did not.
That means I missed four and a half seasons of the show before it wrapped up with Season 11 (!) in 2022. I checked and there were 86 more episodes after I stopped watching! Just The Walking Dead’s later years alone are a longer run than nearly any modern hit streaming series will ever reach in its entirety.
It felt clear having the show go that long was not to its artistic benefit, to say the least. By the time I stopped watching, it was already feeling so redundant and had too many characters making too many frustrating or maddening decisions. But sure, even if the ratings dropped off dramatically by the time it ended, I get that it must have still been a money making success, or AMC wouldn’t have still been bringing it back for so long. And so I shrugged and was bemused from afar as they launched and announced spinoff after spinoff.
The most cynical move though was announcing three different spinoffs based around three different pairings of the most popular and prominent characters still left alive before the original series had even ended. Negan & Maggie, Daryl & Carol, and Rick & Michonne were now all guaranteed to survive the series finale and a lot of stakes were diminished beforehand. (yes, I knew Rick & Michonne were both already off the show by that point, but it still felt like they were wrapped up in this laughable “Don’t worry, everyone you really care about is coming back!” move)
Meanwhile, I wasn’t oblivious to hearing various responses to how the show, and the franchise in general, were going after I stopped watching. Many seemed to feel the original series did have a creative rebound, at least for awhile, from the particularly weak era in which so many of us gave up on it. And I’d heard pretty positive things about the Daryl Dixon series last year (no longer a two-hander with Carol after Melissa McBride decided she didn't want to move to France). But none of it was enough to get me back… until some lingering curiosity and affection for the early days got me to watch The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live.
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