it’s no secret that the critical tide has largely turned on AMC’s zombie series The Walking
Dead. Though it’s still a ratings giant, the show saw major viewership atrophy in its seventh season as a result of eroding goodwill, thanks to its tendency to employ death fake-outs and gruesome cliff-hangers—not to mention 16 episodes that felt directionless at best. Can The Walking Dead be saved and returned to its glory days? Or should it be allowed (like Game of Thrones) to bow out gracefully despite the still-high viewing numbers? A new interview with executive producer Greg Nicotero indicates that if the show can be saved, the first step will be admitting it has a problem.
Though Robert Kirkman’s comic books have found a way to squeeze a continuous story out of Rick Grimes and his embattled band of zombie survivalists, it’s clear that at 99 episodes, The Walking Dead is unsure of how to keep a story about the undead, well, lively. A show that once got major juice from jump scares, dazzling set pieces, and bumping off major characters will, of course, naturally run the risk of audience fatigue.
But the real problem The Walking Dead faces is a major misconception that Nicotero (and presumably others) have—that the way to solve audience fatigue is to turn their attention to the dead, rather than the living. “After seven years of making sure the audience does not get fatigued and goes on this journey with us, it’s pretty important,” Nicotero said in a recent interview with the Empire podcast, referring to the show’s experimentation with special effects. He added that his team has “been able to express ourselves more powerfully visually”—by, say, adding a tiger in Season 7. But visual spectacle alone does not make good television if the human drama can’t keep up.
Nicotero went on to say that he and show-runner Scott Gimple tried to keep their effects experimentations tied to the plot—but throughout Season 7, it often felt like the undead tail was wagging the dog. Nicotero explains:
Scott will come up with some ideas and he’ll immediately reach out and say, “I have this idea for this art installation-type zombies.” The walkers who were in the Oceanside episode with Tara who were in the sandpile. We really wanted them to look different. The idea that they were buried under the sand and desiccated and lacking any sort of moisture. It’s really good after seven years to—it’s a constant thing.
The Oceanside creatures, though, are a perfect example of a plot that felt invented just so Gimple and Nicotero could test the extremes of prosthetic barnacles. Tara’s detour to Oceanside in all its grisly, water-logged glory is given much more time and weight than, say, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment later in the season where she finds out that her girlfriend, Denise, died while she was away.
The same goes for the other (admittedly impressive) Season 7 set pieces Nicotero mentions with pride. Whether it’s Michonne and Rick cutting down a freeway full of zombies or the weaponized battle zombies (yeah, some of them have spikes now) that menaced our heroes in the back half of the season, Nicotero points out that the show has “to remind the audience every once and awhile that the world is dead.” But not at the expense of the living.
The desire to go big or go home on these set pieces may explain why some of the more important character-driven action of the season was sidelined. Nicotero himself mentions budgetary concerns, while over on Vox, Aja Romano distilled the issue like this:
