Yet another series in The Walking Dead franchise will debut in April. This series, World Beyond, will be about the generation born during the zombie apocalypse.
I’ll be honest with you all here: I’m skeptical. I absolutely loved The Walking Dead for the first few seasons. Then it started to repeat itself. And then it started to grind down.
Likewise, the first spinoff series, Fear the Walking Dead, started off weak, and never got much better.
The first episode of the original TWD debuted on October 31, 2010. Almost a decade ago.
At the time, The Walking Dead was something fresh, and highly original. Even though George A. Romero and others had done zombies before, this was the first show to take them seriously, and the first show (or movie) to fill them with interesting subplots and sympathetic characters. (Most of Romero’s characters were so bad, you rooted for the zombies.)
But after nearly a decade, this is starting to seem like a cynical money grab, an attempt to squeeze yet one more drop of milk from a very tired cash cow. It’s like the 17th Star Wars film, or the many, many iterations of various superheroes who first appeared in the mid-twentieth century.
There is a time to let every story be done, and move on to the next one. Create something new.
That point has long since passed for The Walking Dead.
