The Walking Dead debuted on AMC in 2010. As most readers will know, The Walking Dead was a series about…the zombie apocalypse, of all things.

People die, come back to life, and prey on the living!

The Walking Dead was immensely popular from the get-go, among both critics and viewers.

But that didn’t last, as we’ll see shortly.

In one sense, the creators of The Walking Dead did not create anything new. The Walking Dead was not the first zombie tale available to viewers.

Since 1968, the filmmaker George A. Romero (1940-2017) had churned out movies in his “dead” series. These included Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Diary of the Dead (2017).

While Romero’s movies enjoyed a strong cult following, they never really achieved mass appeal. Many horror movie fans liked them, but not much of anyone else did.

The appeal of The Walking Dead, on the other hand, extended far beyond the relatively small audiences that are usually drawn to extreme horror.

The Walking Dead was similar to Romero’s movies. But also very different.

The Walking Dead had plenty of flesh-eating zombies, just like the George A. Romero’s films. The Walking Dead was violent and intense, just like the films of Romero.

But unlike Romero’s films, The Walking Dead was also focused on quality scripts and character development. The Walking Dead was as much a drama series as a horror series.

And the drama was top-notch. Many viewers cared more about the characters and their struggles than they did about the zombies.

Herein lay the difference. 

As a result of this difference, The Walking Dead attracted millions of viewers who had never had any interest in the horror genre—and certainly not in the gruesome zombie sub-genre of horror.

I was amazed at how many of my female friends, in particular, became diehard fans of the show. Women who, in high school, would have scoffed at the idea of reading a Stephen King novel.

Even my mother enjoyed the first few seasons of The Walking Dead. And my mom had never had any interest in horror movies. (She’d always hated them, in fact.)

***

The “secret sauce” of The Walking Dead was the well-written drama and character development mentioned above, interwoven with the expected tropes of the zombie genre. The combination of the drama and the horror made The Walking Dead a favorite of anyone who loved a good story.

But then things deteriorated. During the fifth and sixth seasons, the taut storytelling and character development of the first few seasons were replaced with repetitive violence and gore—an insidious temptation in anything zombie-related.

This trend hit a nadir in the first episode of the seventh season. The seventh season’s initial installment began with an act of sadistic human-on-human violence that was well…over the top.

This was the now famous—or infamous—“bat episode”. The villain Negan brutally killed two of the show’s main characters with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.

I watched it, and hated it.

I wasn’t alone. Millions of other viewers hated it, too.

As more than one critic pointed out, The Walking Dead had degenerated into “torture porn”.

George A. Romero’s zombie films had also wallowed in the excesses of human depravity and cruelty.

This, too, is a common trope in zombie stories. It’s a natural outcome of the genre’s premise. As the world descends into post-apocalyptic chaos, the surviving humans give in to all the evil impulses that society ordinarily keeps in check.

That theme has its place, but it can easily be overdone—even in a zombie apocalypse story.

George A. Romero’s movies overdid it.

And now The Walking Dead had overdone it, too. In a big way.

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But why?

Here’s my theory: The Walking Dead’s producers, writers, and showrunners had lost sight of what made the show so darned great in its first few seasons.

Or maybe they never identified it to begin with….

***

Over the years, I’ve followed numerous rock bands, novelists, and movie producers whose creative careers rise and fall with the following trajectory:

1. The creator comes out of nowhere with a sequence of masterpieces. This might be a run of near-perfect albums, page-turning novels, or edge-of-the-seat movies.
2. Then one day, the creator releases something that “isn’t quite up to their usual standard”.
3. Then the next thing is equally lackluster.
4. And the next thing. And so on. Nothing is ever quite the same again.

***

Such a creator may continue to ride the coattails of their previous work in the marketplace, but the glory days never return. After the debacle of Season Seven, AMC continued to milk the cash cow of The Walking Dead for four more seasons (plus a slew of spinoffs).

But for most of us, the magic of those first few seasons was gone.

What is the cause of this observable and so often repeating phenomenon? A rock band, novelist, or filmmaker shouldn’t be subject to the age-related declines that are so inescapable for athletes.

Nor is this phenomenon limited to artists. It can happen to restauranteurs, self-employed tradespersons, and corporate employees.

***

This is the other side of quality control.

Just as you need to understand what you are doing wrong when things go badly, you also need to understand what you have done right when you hit one out of the park.

Or hit a bunch of them out of the park.

***

How do you know that?

You analyze your process. You identify your secret sauce, and keep on doing what works.

It wouldn’t have been difficult for the writers, producers, and showrunners of The Walking Dead to get together and say: “What makes our show so successful is strong dramatic storytelling, combined with the horror elements of the zombie genre. So let’s keep doing that!”

But that isn’t what they did.

-ET