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After 12 years and nearly 200 episodes, AMC will soon offer up its conclusion to The Walking Dead. The zombie drama premiered, fittingly, on Halloween 2010 to a horde of five million viewers. That number would grow up to three times as large over the next several years before losing steam over the back half of its 10+ seasons on TV. Amid arguably questionable calls in the writers room and an increasingly fragmented audience spread across countless streaming services, The Walking Dead has been bleeding viewers since Season 5, from a peak of 17 million down to just two million watching weekly in Season 11.
Nonetheless, the network has big plans for the story’s world, going so far as to coin it The Walking Dead Universe (TWDU). But as viewers continue to jump ship in the show’s final hours, it’s oddly the biggest fans who are caught in the crosshairs of strange marketing decisions. The Walking Dead has a number of spinoffs on the way, and chances are fans plan to sample them all, even if they’d rather not know about them at this point.
Note: This article discusses potential spoilers for The Walking Dead. If you’ve not yet learned about the show’s spinoffs, consider yourself warned.
One could argue that the four most important characters in The Walking Dead’s post-Rick Grimes era are Daryl, Carol, Negan, and Maggie. Three of them have been around since the first two seasons, while Negan (Jeffery Dean Morgan)–a fan favorite–first popped up in Season 6. Morgan brings a level of prestige the show hasn’t really introduced much since Darabont left. So why is it that with half of the final season yet to air, I and the two million other hangers-on already know that these four will survive whatever the series finale looks like?
In case you missed it, AMC has loudly and proudly announced multiple spinoffs for The Walking Dead in addition to the two we’ve already seen premiere, Fear The Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: World Beyond. One of the three post-main series spinoffs (four, if you count those Rick Grimes movies we will supposedly see someday) will be an anthology, which is a fun idea and leaves room for the writers to travel outside of the US or perhaps answer some lingering questions, like whatever happened to Heath anyway?
But two other spinoffs can only be described as officially sanctioned spoilers from the marketing side of the network. Daryl and Carol are getting their own spinoff in a yet-to-be-named series, while Maggie and Negan are heading north to New York City for Isle of The Dead.
For dedicated fans, this means the story’s biggest characters have guaranteed plot armor for the rest of the series. Imagine if we knew Jon Snow, Dani, Arya, and Sansa were all getting their own series after Game of Thrones ended, or if way back in 2010, we found out Sawyer and Hurley would be getting a post-Lost spinoff. This sort of information hurts a show like The Walking Dead, where the life-and-death stakes are often the driving force of the drama. Why would my heart skip a beat the next time Daryl is pinned by a few walkers? We know how it ends. He survives. AMC has told us as much in press releases, tweets, and on its fan-centered talk show, Talking Dead.
I understand wanting to maintain momentum for the TWDU after the main series ends, but I think you can do that in a number of ways, and AMC has instead chosen the way that pays little regard to the dwindling number of diehards like me. With viewership sinking on nearly a per-episode basis for five years, it’s hard to see how the solution could be to both cling to legacy characters that may turn away new eyes and spoil the ongoing final episodes for the few superfans the series still has.
With the massive plans for The Walking Dead Universe in motion, I already expect the mainline series finale to be unlike traditional finales. We aren’t going to get the same sense of closure one might expect from something like Breaking Bad or The Leftovers, because this is a world that, despite being 12 years old already, has many more years ahead of it so long as fans tune in. But to get those fans to tune in, showrunners and the higher-ups to whom they answer first must get this show to some sort of exciting conclusion that makes us feel like it was all time well spent, while still wanting to spend more time, too. Spoiling characters’ fates is no way to win anyone over.
These days, everyone wants to have their shared story universe. Marvel has mastered it. DC is trying. Even video game companies like Remedy have set the stage for some exciting crossovers that blend series into one overarching saga. There is a lot of money to be made in creating a shared world that entices fans to go deeper and stick around for longer, so it’s hard to begrudge AMC for trying it with something like The Walking Dead. On paper, it’s a great fit. The whole world has presumably been affected by the zombie plague much like Thanos’ Snap rippled across all of Earth.
There’s plenty of room to grow, and The Walking Dead’s spinoffs have at least sometimes shown us the promise of a more expansive undead world–looking at you Seasons 3 and 6 of Fear the Walking Dead. Fans who are in for a penny may be in for a pound, but not if they can already see where the story is going before they get there. The playbook for creating a massive story universe is out in the open, already executed well by a number of other huge franchises, so the hope is the minds behind The Walking Dead will do better to follow those trailblazers instead of spoiling its own would-be epic conclusion to a prolific series.
