By Matthew Nemeth
AMC needs to change, that much is obvious. They are mishandling and mistreating The Walking Dead which is by far their biggest show on TV right now. The Walking Dead has had a string of bad behind the scenes stuff happening just this year alone. From a stuntman dying on set, Robert Kirkman taking future projects over to Amazon as well as suing AMC for up to £1 billion dollars and finally a recent major character’s actor/actress being fired, don’t worry, i won’t spoil that.
We do a podcast on this website for The Walking Dead which i host and this season i have not been talking about some of the smaller episode problems and for the sake of time i’m only going to point out 2 here if you want to skip past this part it’s just below the small paragraph with example 2. The 1st one is when Daryl and Rick are chasing down a savior, Rick is is a small truck, Daryl is on his bike and the savior is in the back compartment of another small truck he has a mounted minigun which he shoots at both Rick and Daryl, Daryl does get hit and falls off his bike but 2 mins later Daryl is back on his bike and him and the bike are both completely fine, at best Daryl’s bike should have been damaged. Rick is sitting in his mini truck and is being shot at and not attempting to move, the savior would have probably killed Rick and maybe Daryl too.
Example 2, there has been a noticeable problem with the guns this season, some of them have nothing come out of the gun at all when shot and others have absolutely no recoil, again, sloppy.
Ok with that out of the way, AMC is being greedy, sloppy and is ultimately the big boss of The Walking Dead, just note that the other 2 very successful shows Breaking Bad and Mad Men where made by Sony and just aired on AMC whereas AMC both produced and airs The Walking Dead so they are in charge of it all and therefore own The Walking Dead Television Series.
So AMC needs to change, with The Walking Dead being their clear flagship show, but with ratings dropping and critical buzz being at an all-time low (unless you consider the negetive buzz) The Walking Dead is in the most trouble it has ever been, The Walking Dead season 7 premiere had 17 million viewers, skip ahead to the mid-season finale of season 8 the most recent episode which had just 7.9 million, that’s a massive drop off, why is the audience no longer seeing this big Sunday night AMC drama as must-see appointment viewing TV anymore? because it’s audience feels it’s gotten sloppy and i do too.
I myself am not quite done with the show yet but if things get any worse any if it feels like they have thrown the comics out of the window and it’s no longer The Walking Dead to me then i may be out and i’m a guy who reads the comics, plays the Telltale video game and even owns a few Macfarlane made figurines and i don’t want the show to crumble and sink but at this point AMC needs to change their production or they will sink, along with The Walking Dead but hopefully at that point the show will be rebooted in a better place prefferably HBO, Netflix or Amazon. Amazon possibly being the more likely with Kirkman there but you never know.
The Walking Dead is not immune to cancellation, Nothing is, But if ratings do continue to drop then AMC won’t have a choice.
I hope you have got the point i have tried to make in this article but regardless if you did or not please feel free to discuss this with me using the information and email below and thank you for reading. Also, i have tried to be nice in this article as i have lost the energy to have more of a go at AMC but if you want to listen to 2 guys that are not so nice towards the show check out Bald Move‘s podcast called Watching Dead on baldmove.com