The Walking Dead's eighth season is almost upon us. The season premiere airs this Sunday on AMC, and the question I have is simple: Will Season 8 be a return to form for the long-running zombie drama, or will the ratings slip that began in Season 7 continue? Can the showrunners get this show back on track, or will it continue to derail?
I am equal parts hope and skepticism. I've already seen the season premiere (you can read my spoiler-free preview of that here) and I'm very sad to report that it does not inspire confidence. Still, it's just one episode. It's entirely possible that the vast bulk of Season 8 will be amazing, however unlikely. After all, how often does a TV show like this remain in fighting shape this far into its run?
In any case, as readers will well know by now, I have many outspoken critiques of The Walking Dead. It's a show that I used to love and that I'd really love to love again. I know it's possible to turn it around, too, because that's exactly what Fear The Walking Dead did in its third season, going from a show I almost gave up on, to one that I believe has fully eclipsed The Walking Dead in terms of quality.
So what can The Walking Dead do to shore up falling ratings and save its reputation after a disastrous Season 7? Here are eight ways the show can change in order to surprise us all and come back swinging.
1. Dramatically slim down the cast.
See that picture above? That's just a fraction of the entire cast we now have to keep track of in The Walking Dead. And the one person no longer in the picture is one of the only characters the show shouldn't have killed off: Glenn. Truly, The Walking Dead is worse off without Glenn, a character that had certainly been under-utilized before his death, but who was also an anchor to a sense of real goodness, who had a moral compass and a hero's instinct.
We can't turn back time, of course. The show stuck to the comics to its detriment, killing off one of the only likable characters remaining. Of course, when I say Glenn was under-utilized as a character prior to his death, that speaks to a different problem that really can be addressed going forward. The cast has simply grown far too large and cumbersome to really manage in a weekly, 42-minute-long show (plus commercials.)
That picture above doesn't even include members of the Kingdom like King Ezekiel, or Gregory or Negan or Dwight or the Trash People. It does, however, interestingly juxtapose Glenn with the other two major victims of Season 7. Next to him is Abraham (who Negan murdered simultaneously) and then Sasha, who met her end in the Season 7 finale. As a side note, I wonder if the placement at the table is intentional, and we have a clue to the next few deaths on the show. First Morgan, then Rosita, etc. I doubt it, but it's an interesting thought.
More importantly it speaks to perhaps The Walking Dead's biggest problem. The cast is too huge. It has to be slimmed down. This is something that Fear The Walking Dead has done incredibly well (even if I disagree with who it has and hasn't killed off...) There is a core cast remaining on that show that's very manageable. Each character gets plenty of screen-time and character development. You never have awkward scenes like when Rick and the survivors confront Gregory in his mansion, and they could barely squeeze everyone into the same room together.
The Walking Dead has often tried to solve this conundrum by having entire episodes devoted to just a couple characters. This way everyone gets some time in the sun. The problem with this approach is that there are so many characters that you have to spend weeks in-between seeing them. Season 7 ought to have been about Maggie's rise to power, her hunger for revenge. Instead we barely even saw Maggie. We barely saw Carol. Daryl had maybe three lines of dialogue.
It's time to drastically slim the cast down, getting rid of characters we don't care about so that we can spend more time with the ones we do. I'm having a harder time saying exactly who those characters might be, so badly each has been treated by the writers and showrunners in the last couple seasons, which brings me to my next point...
2. Write human characters who make human choices.
This has almost certainly been my biggest and longest-running complaint about the show. For a show so much about its characters, The Walking Dead sure has a tendency to make them do stupid, out-of-character things solely to further the plot.
Recall Rick's decision in Season 6 to move the trapped herd of zombies in the quarry. It was a terrible plan. It was filled with potential risks that nobody addressed. Nobody said to Rick "This is a bad plan, let's not do this." Everybody just accepted it as fate. Compare that to Fear The Walking Dead this season. The conflict over the ranch led to all kinds of different factions forming and disagreements aired, and ultimately to various betrayals, murder and cover-ups. It's not that everyone was making the best choices, it's that the choices being made were true to each character.
Recall, too, Rick's return to Alexandria after the spectacular (and predictable) failure of his plan. While away, the Wolves (remember them?) invaded, butchering the inhabitants before being chased off by Morgan and Carol (who, once upon a time, had an interesting dynamic: He refused to kill, she refused to understand why. This has all been thrown out now.) When Rick returns, narry a word about the Wolf attack is discussed. It's literally as though nothing happened.
On to Season 7 and we have Rick giving up all the guns in one half of the season, never even considering hiding some away. Then he spends the second half trying to get guns, and then trading a bunch of them away to untested new allies who--surprise!--stab him in the back. I could keep going about these bizarre, imbecilic decisions and plans. I could go back further in the show, too, to earlier seasons when similarly bad, out-of-character choices were made (though it was less frequent for the most part, outside of characters like Andrea...**shudder**.)
More often than not, these are unforced errors on the part of the writers and showrunners. There are ways to make bad things happen that don't happen as a result of a character making some bizarre choice or devising some absurdly stupid plan. In almost every scenario you could simply rework the situation a little bit so that the consequence happens because of a hard choice rather than a dumb choice, or because of bad luck even. Take Season 6's terrible plan to guide the zombie heard out of the quarry and away from Alexandria. What if, instead of coming up with this terrible plan, Rick had simply stumbled on the heard already leaving the quarry and had to race back to get help. The situation would have been too dire for a well-constructed plan, and they would have had to go out and do the best they could off the cuff.
Or in Season 7, what if instead of giving up all the guns, Rick had tried to transport them to a hiding spot but, on his way, was betrayed. The guns were confiscated and two or three more characters were killed off (See #1.) Then Rick would have had a reason to go look for guns in the second half of the season that didn't involve him just giving up. Later, instead of the bizarre and obviously untrustworthy Trash People, what if they'd encountered a group that seemed normal, and that maybe was filled with good people (like the Kingdom's inhabitants) but who ended up betraying Rick and co. because Negan had hostages or some other leverage over them. What if the show had made us truly trust this other group (and like them, too) before the big twist?
You can see where I'm going with this, I hope. All the infuriating, out-of-character nonsense in this show could be fixed with just the tiniest bit of effort. I'm coming up with these ideas as I write this post, off the top of my head. It's really not that hard. And with a team of writers who really cared about these characters and not just getting from Point A to Point B, we'd have a much better show on our hands. As the show slides further away from grittty realism to comic book superheros vs super-villains, this only becomes more important. Which brings me to my next point...
3. Wrap up the Negan story as quickly as possible.
In Season 3 of Fear The Walking Dead, there were rarely clear villains and even more rarely clear heroes. Jeremiah Otto was a survivalist rancher with alcoholic and abusive tendencies and a dark past and a racist streak, yet even he had a good side. He was sympathetic, though we sympathized less the more we got to know him. His crazy son Troy was all kinds of messed up and caused all kinds of pain, but there was something very raw and human about him, too. Meanwhile, the Otto's primary antagonists, a Native American tribe set on reclaiming the land the Otto's live on, was far from the "noble savage" stereotype that Hollywood so often foists on Native people. Taqa, the leader of this group, was a good man willing to do terrible things to get his justice and revenge, willing to cast aside innocent lives in his bloodthirsty quest.
I could keep talking about the excellent, multifaceted characters on Fear The Walking Dead but I want to pause so we can focus on what's become of the parent show. We have Rick, Maggie and Ezekiel, heroic leaders giving speeches to their heroic followers on one side. On the other we have the coward Gregory and the nursery-rhyme spewing psychopath, Negan. While I certainly question the heroism of our heroes (Rick started this war by murdering Saviors in their sleep, a villainous and cowardly act) the show itself has clearly set this up as Good Guys vs Bad Guys. There is very little complexity here. You have no sympathy for Negan. Now, not even Morgan questions Rick's brash leadership and his proclivity for violence and tyranny.
The show wants us to believe that as All Out War approaches between Rick's gang and the Saviors, that there are clear lines in the sand. That on the one side is hope and justice and good and on the other wickedness and evil. But that's not very interesting, and it's not even very accurate. The Saviors retaliated against Rick's murderous raid by killing just two of his number and then essentially letting them live free so long as they paid taxes (tribute, whatever.) This was hardly justice for the crimes committed against them, unprovoked. I'm not saying Negan's people are saints, but they're being portrayed as far more evil than they actually act in the show.
Outside of a few good moments (like when Maggie burns her Savior captors who we had come to empathize with) this is all cartoon villain stuff. Cartoon villain Negan going up against Cartoon Hero Rick. I want the opposite of this. I want the other survivors to dispute Rick's choices. I want them to confront their own crimes. And I want to be able to sympathize with the bad guys to the point where it's far from clear who is good and who is bad to begin with.
4. Give dialogue some much-needed TLC.
One way you can achieve this is with good dialogue. Good conversations and arguments can really deepen and enrich a TV show, but The Walking Dead has felt increasingly forced, with dialogue so spare and even abstract that it doesn't even feel like real people talking to one another sometimes.
This ties in to all three previous points. If the cast was more contained, there'd be more room for great dialogue between core cast members. Better dialogue would help characters feel more real and human. And better dialogue might help avoid things like Negan's opening line in the Season 8 trailer:
Or the terrible speech Rick gives later in the same trailer.
The Walking Dead is an action zombie drama, but in its best moments it's a story about people talking to each other. It hasn't been that in a long time, but it used to be.
5. No more awful special effects like that fake deer.
Seriously, one thing that I never even thought I'd be complaining about in this show was bad special effects. It was always a show that prized its amazing zombie make-up. But then, in Season 7, we got The Deer:
How did this fake deer make it into the episode? Why couldn't they just film a real deer? The arrogance required to serve this up to audiences is brazen.
Oh, and remember the fake trash backdrop?
I'm embarrassed just looking at this, on AMC's behalf.
Truly, though, this has been a show that's consistently excellent in this department. It needs to return to that gold standard in Season 8.
6. Get rid of the Trash People ASAP, and cut back on communities in general.
There are times in The Walking Dead when you would not be remiss in thinking that a zombie apocalypse never occurred to begin with. Multiple thriving communities exist. Most of the characters appear well fed (some more than others) and well groomed. All the women have perfect hair. All the men keep their beards well-trimmed or their faces shaved entirely. Nobody seems dirty, or at least not for long.
I miss the days when Rick had a huge bushy beard. I miss the days when they had to camp out in the woods and hang cans from strings to warn of an approaching Walker. I miss the days before the Kingdom was a thing, and Alexandria and Hilltop and all the rest.
But of all these communities, inexplicably diluting the apocalypse, none is more loathsome or unnecessary than the Trash People. (The all-female community that shoots everyone on sight is a close second.) The Trash People don't even talk like real people. They're out of a far-future Mad Max world, not an America just recently overrun by zombies. Nor do they act like real people, or cut their hair like real people.
I'd be happy if they were just written off the show completely in a hail of bullets. But more importantly, the show just needs to get away from all this population. Woodbury was remarkable because it was essentially the only community left standing (that we knew about.) The Governor was a leader not because he was cruel, but because he did a good job leading his group. That he was also cruel made him interesting, but it wasn't his only quality or vice.
Communities should not be commonplace or easy. Our own group has struggled constantly to form one, whether at the farm or the prison or even Alexandria, which they ruined. Communities should be fragile and easily undone, and most importantly they should be rare. Let's get back to that.
7. Give us some sexual tension.
I think the closest thing to actual sexual tension in this show was when Rick wanted to hook up with Jesse but she was married. At least in that subplot there was some sexual tension. Jesse and Rick both had the hots for each other (her husband was an abusive jerk, after all) but ultimately it didn't go anywhere. Rick killed Pete, the husband, driving Jesse and her children away from him in the process. Then they were all eaten by zombies.
Later Rick and Michonne were just like "Hey we're a thing now." But that's no fun. The fun part of a TV romance is the wait, the chase, the time period when the two lovers want to be together but can't be. (See, for instance, the first couple seasons of The Office.)
The only kind of compelling romance in this show has been Maggie and Glenn, but even that was played down pretty severely (and came to nothing but misery in the end.) The show's other attempts at romance lately have been the weird love triangle between Abraham, Sasha and Rosita, which was terrible in every conceivable way. I know this is the zombie apocalypse and everything, but why not give us some true love at the same time?
Here's an idea: What about a really great romance between bad guys, or between a bad guy and one of the show's good guys? I say bad guys loosely here, as I'd really love to see more complicated antagonists. A love story might kill two birds with one stone.
8. Make it scary again.
Do you remember when The Walking Dead was scary? When our heroes would go into houses and move from room to room, never knowing what terror lurked in wait?
I do, but only vaguely. I'm pretty sure this used to be a scary show with jump scares and long, dragged out moments of frightening tension, sometimes ending in a character death. It just hasn't been that kind of show in a long, long time.
It needs to be, though. Even the bad guys could be more fright-inducing. I was honestly more freaked out by the Terminus cannibals when they were about to butcher Rick and gang before Carol showed up like Rambo to save them than I ever was of Negan, and he actually went through with his Lucille-to-the-skull promise.
A zombie survival show should be scary. The Walking Dead isn't. It's mostly either slow, padded out melodrama or high action, with very little in-between.
Bonus: Stop padding episodes with filler.
That reminds me of a ninth point. The Walking Dead is constantly padded out so that they can fill an entire season with 15 or 16 episodes. This needs to stop. If this show is going to run for years and years, they could easily scale it back to ten episodes (or even twelve) and have it be that much better for lack of filler.
This would require #1 to happen, of course, because as we saw in Season 7 of Game of Thrones, cutting down too far with a big cast can result in the opposite sin: A sense of everything being rushed.
Either way, a smaller cast, fewer episodes, and less padding in each episode would go a long way toward making this show more watchable. Maybe that's something they could do for Season 9, though it won't ever happen more likely given how many advertising dollars AMC would risk losing.
Bonus #2: Get a haircut, Carl.
Seriously, this is not a good look on Carl. I know I keep saying this but for goodness sake, kid, if you're going to do the long hair thing at least make it look decent. In what universe is this a good look for a boy? For anyone? The swooping bangs thing is...well I don't know what it is, but I know it scares me.
That's all for now, folks.
The Walking Dead Season 8 premiere airs this Sunday at 9 pm ET. My review will go live directly after. I look forward to chatting with you all about it. I'm sure some of you will agree and some of you will want me to burn in hell for all eternity. So it goes.
Read my preview/spoiler-free review of the Season 8 premiere here.
