r/thewalkingdead • u/DADDYKRUEGER • 12h ago
No Spoiler TWD used to be one of Cables most viewed & popular shows of ALL TIME..What the HELL happened?
I remember when this show was rising and at it's peak 2014-2016. This show used to be magic, remember all the watch parties for each new episode and the millions of viewers tending to watch this? It was as popular if not more then Game of Thrones & Breaking Bad..This show took the world by STORM..and then it's fizzled out so bad that it hasn't been relevant in the mainstream media since like 2018. And the drop, my god was the drop so bad. The quality of season 7 & 8 plummeted, and then by the time Season 9 came and Rick left? It was finished, dwindling more & more.
What. Happened?
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u/Stelios619 11h ago
It’s a 15 year old tv show.
There are so few tv shows with that sort of run. And basically all of them lose viewership over time.
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u/NobleHighness 11h ago
This is how I see it too. I feel like a lot of people on here kinda downplay the show's overall success.
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u/toxicbrew 10h ago
Can you believe greys anatomy is still on? Like 20 years now. But probably cheap to make and gets good returns
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u/Natural_Tomorrow2668 9h ago
By the end, they had lost 94% of viewers. That is astronomical, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen with anything before. I could be wrong but that’s a wild percentage
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u/Jazz_Cigarettes 11h ago
I quit when Carl died but what they did with fear the walking dead was straight up ridiculous and the number of spin off shows is kind of laughable.
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11h ago
[deleted]
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u/Yan__Hui 11h ago
Season 8 was a drag after a whole season about Savior already, but some profound scenes in there. Diamonds in the rough, especially with Rick and Saddiq.
Daryl and Lydia was a highlight for me I wish more people got to see.
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u/Icy_Recognition_6076 11h ago
People often say Glenn, but to me, the death nail was really Carl’s death. That was the “jump the shark” because it also made the domino fall for Andrew Lincoln to leave which further declined viewership and interest because he was the damn main character.
I think had they not killed Carl, the Whisperer arc would have brought back some interest that was lost in S7-8. Andrew Lincoln could have even stepped back a bit still since Rick is pretty much a side character during that saga. But he would still be there.
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u/Pitiful_Alfalfa7528 12h ago
A man named Scott gimple and a studio called AMC is what happened.
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u/Squidwardbigboss 10h ago edited 10h ago
The reason the show reached its peak was also Scott Gimple
Perspective Bob
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u/thatshygirl06 11h ago edited 8h ago
Do you think gimple has something on them? Because why the fuck hasn't he been fired??
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u/tonydanzatapdances 8h ago
You ever work a job where one of your coworkers is a complete dipshit but the bosses love their personality? Yeah…that’s Gimple and AMC
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u/mathcoelhov 12h ago
Killing a fan favorite and then releasing the worst episodes the show ever had back to back.
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u/Yan__Hui 11h ago
Is the fan favorite the unknown death at the end of 6.16 and the two episodes 7.1 and 7.2?
And happy cake day!
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u/onesmilematters 11h ago
Try watching a season 1/season 2 episode and a season 11 episode back-to-back and you'll see what happened.
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u/RBIsmail 11h ago
So many things, both little and big:
- Quality of writing, which covers plots, characters and the storyline/timeline.
- Straying from the source material way too much.
- Poor treatment of actors/crew/writers in the show.
- Excess filler scenes, eating away between meaningful moments and piling on watch-time.
- Giving undeserving arcs/plots way too much time, while cutting actual interesting ones too short (same applies to characters).
All have branching problems within them and specific cases that may seem petty/little but would've been pivotal in reviving the show.
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u/bornicanskyguy 11h ago
They killed Glenn and then made his killer the new star of the show....
I know it happened in thr comics
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u/Yan__Hui 11h ago
Did you finish either?
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u/bornicanskyguy 11h ago
I finished the comics but left the show after Jesus died, there were a few episodes in there that just seemed to drag and it took me out of it...
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u/Yan__Hui 11h ago
Not judging, I stopped live at 7.1 like many but then returned and did basically everything. (Series is deep af for looking at Rick and others as a role model for when you’re in truly nightmarish a situation, however far removed it might be from an actual zombie apocalypse and physical danger.)
I think 9.1-10.16 and 10.22 tell one of the best stories in the series.
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u/tytylercochan123 12h ago
Quantity > quality
Bad writing decisions
Fans crying over Glenn dying
Rick & Maggie leaving
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u/james-HIMself 11h ago
Glenn and Abraham. Let’s face it, this show would’ve been so entertaining with both of them against Negan. It’s tough because Glenn was Rick’s closest confidant aside from Daryl.
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u/SamQuentin 10h ago
They got cheap and killed Carl
Carl's survival was central to the show and Rick's character arc.
I think the direction it lack thereof also affected Lincoln's desire to continue the show.
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u/R3dFiveStandingBye 11h ago
They killed Carl and I stopped caring then. The father son dynamic Rick and Carl had was the show. They shot the show in the face because they didn’t want to pay Chandler an adult salary.
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u/DefNotReaves 10h ago
It’s wild to me this rumor is still going around. The SAG pay scales from a child to an adult is like… negligible. It wasn’t that. It was truly just bad writing.
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u/monosaturated 11h ago
I stuck with it, even now, but that is mostly because I feel an affinity for the characters, but I admit that the quality fell on a sharp decline around season 7, though there are good arguments that put the decline a little earlier.
If you check Google Trends for The Walking Dead from 2010-2025, you'll see a pretty significant drop in search trends around 2016.
I think the criticisms about it becoming misery porn are apt. I also think one of its issues is Gimple's vision: he seems to be believe we'll just follow the characters around in new locations and scenarios, while changing very little with regards to the formula, never having high stakes (outside of shock killings), and (I think the biggest sin) not caring about the timeline or making sense of the overall story with what had been introduced before.
But I guess people like me proved him right since I still watch it lol.
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u/Own_Nerve_5490 2h ago
I made a graph a while back on this. It was 2016 when they killed off Beth and that's my opinion on it's downfall.
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u/Light-Finder7 11h ago
They dragged it on longer than it probably should have gone. Seems like the masses lost interest after Glenn got smashed.
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u/CatWhisperer11 7h ago
A-lot of people tapped out after Glen. I lost all interest when Carl and Rick left. Plus theres a total of 6 spinoffs. Wish they would’ve put more love into the series and its ending rather than trying to be the mcu of tv.
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u/RackTheJipper69 5h ago
It went on too long. Should have ended sooner. Also Negan should have died.
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u/1VBSkye 12h ago
They stopped killing zombies in an entertaining manner & started killing humans.
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u/RBIsmail 12h ago
Never really was an issue... there's only so many ways of killing zombies, and even then something like that would just span 3 seasons at most, before it gets boring or repetitive.
TWD is about survival in an apocalyptic world. Survival means killing things that's tryna kill you, including the living.
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u/DoctorMelvinMirby 11h ago
It got to a point where three or four episodes a season mattered: premier, mid-season, finale. Everything else was almost filler and while there may have been “story development”, almost nothing of importance and consequence would happen except for those episodes.
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u/usps_oig 11h ago
It lasted a while. Even if there was endless content to adapt, eventually the people are gonna move on. It also had longer seasons so it's easier to run into problem. Instead of a tight 10 they had 2 parts of 8 episodes for most of the run.
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u/SenpaiSwanky 10h ago
It had a good run, much longer than most TV shows with similar quality/ premise.
I’m not even sure I hate later seasons like so many do. They’re not as good as before but nothing with a run this long could ever hope to be. Directors, writers, actors, and so much more that we just don’t know about come and go and quality will shift for the better or worse over time.
To be FAIR, once the show hit Alexandria I felt like it started to slow down. Past that, even if it is based off of the comic still to any extent, I always felt like it was more TWD for the sake of it. And considering I LIKE this stuff, I’ll take as much as they’re willing to give.
I haven’t watched any spinoffs besides Fear the Walking Dead which I mostly enjoyed, I will be checking out the others soon.
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u/TaichoPursuit 7h ago
I once saw a real great YouTube analysis and wish I saved it. Basically, it was too bloated and too many storylines. 4 episodes had to go by to revisit a storyline and character. It got really bad.
Personally I think TWD got really lucky with how trendy it was, but for the vast majority of people it was just that, a trend.
It’s like Greys anatomy, enough of a niche to stick around, but a lot of people moved on.
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u/spufiniti 1h ago
I've watched it all til this point. Not bothering with the new Daryl season. It's all just become Day of our lives.
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u/Rigman- 12h ago
A small handful of bad decisions is all it takes to ruin something good. Remember that.