How The Walking Dead Has Proven That Killing Off Main Characters Doesn't Improve a Story

You know you've got nothing left to say in your show when all you can do is tease the audience with "who's going to die next?"  Or at least, you should know this.  Unfortunately, the producers of The Walking Dead didn't realize this when they put together season seven; and the audience didn't help when they enabled them with a record-breaking first episode.

Audiences turned on the show later in the season as the show went through a record-breaking drop in viewership.  However, the audiences that turned on the show should have seen it coming long before that, during the end of season six.  First, the pacing slowed way down as the stretched out the story so it could end on its "cliffhanger," and the final episode saw the characters wandering through the woods for eternity, only to be captured yet again, and then we were all forced to listen to a drawn out speech by Neagan.  It was dull, uninteresting, and clearly intended to waste time.  But hey, he had a bat with barbed wire which had a name!  That made it all better, right?

And finally he beat someone unseen by the camera, and the season stopped there.  The intent was to make the audience wonder all summer who he had killed, and they played into that with all of their marketing.  It was the same sort of marketing that's worked ever since "Who shot JR?" in the '70s.  The difference is, with "Who shot JR?" and other more interesting cliffhangers, there was a mystery one could intellectually try to solve.  With Walking Dead, it was just a gimmick.

Like many shows today, The Walking Dead has thrived off the suspense gained through major characters being killed.  It's a tactic that started with the show V in the 1980s, and has caught on with audiences for making the story unpredictable.  However, this is a tool, and it should be used as such.  Placing this element front and center cheapens it, and cheapens the show by making it all about "who's going to die" rather than "what's going to happen in the story?"  Deaths of characters should support the storyline, not the other way around.  But the writers and producers of The Walking Dead seem to have forgotten that, even into the first episode of season seven, which did nothing but continue to tease the audience with "who's it going to be?"

By the time Neagan quit yapping, I didn't care who it was going to be.  I just wanted him to shut the hell up and get on with it already.  And when he did, it seems as though the show expected us to be impressed with their willingness to kill off beloved characters.  But that's what they've gotten wrong.

The death of a beloved character can work when used correctly.  The Red Wedding in Game of Thrones worked because it took the story from being about a straight revenge war into being one of a family who's scattered throughout the kingdom rising up against a tyrant who's in charge.  The deaths served the story.

What purpose did killing Glenn or Abraham serve?  It just means we don't get to take the journey with those characters anymore.  Shows like this have forgotten that the concept of a story is to take a journey with some characters, and at a certain point, when you take that away, audiences simply lose interest.  Which they did.  The show lost more than seven million viewers throughout the season.  It took them a little longer than it should have for them to come around, but at last they did.

The lesson they should learn is, it takes more than a named bat to make an interesting story.  Unfortunately, though, it seems they haven't learned that lesson, as they've continued the Neagan story onto season eight.

Head slap.