The Walking Dead franchise has now been on television since 2010 and has produced four shows with more on the way. And even though the main series was at one point the highest-rated scripted series across all channels, the Walking Dexit has been claiming its audience as viewership has dropped off notably in recent years. There is of course a very good reason for that: the quality of the writing has been on the downswing for some time. TWD started to waver after its seventh season. Fear the Walking Dead went astray pretty quickly after its first season and multiple soft reboots have not helped. World Beyond was a twenty-hour show that could have been condensed into a four-hour mini-series. And then there is the latest entry, Tales of the Walking Dead.
When I first heard of this planned spin-off, I figured that it would be a great way to revitalize the franchise. There are so many characters from the many seasons of the TWD entries that the show could revisit, and there are plenty of storylines it could expand on as well (the early days of the Saviors, or the prison, or Woodbury, etc). There is also a whole world overrun with zombies that the show could explore and a limitless possibility of new characters it could introduce. And there are plenty of celebrated zombie writers out there whose talents could add to the franchise (Max Brooks, Keith Taylor, Sarah Lyons Fleming, just to name a few). So with all that possibility, there is absolutely no excuse for the mediocre-at-best six episode run that was the show’s first season.
Here’s a quick rundown of the show’s episodes:
Ep 1: Evie/Joe – This was an okay start with an interesting episode about people making a connection in a post-apocalyptic world. Nothing ground-breaking, but a decent episode.
Ep 2: Blair/Gina – A time loop in the zombie-pocalypse? But why? I kept hoping that they would explain it as the last minutes of one of the characters fading into zombie oblivion as they relived what they might have done differently to change their fate. But no, it was a time loop. It was still kind of fun, but really seemed out of place.
Ep 3: Dee – One of the biggest bads of TWD–the woman who will become Alpha–gets a little bit more added to her backstory, and this is where the show should shine. But instead it delivered only a passable tale that didn’t do too much to build on the pre-Alpha years nor her daughter Lydia.
Ep 4: Amy/Dr. Everett – This one started out seeming like it might deliver an interesting parody of the genre with its documentary approach, but then that was dropped. It was an okay episode, but mostly treading water.
Ep 5: Davon – No more treading water at this point. This episode is just non-sensical trash. Don’t even bother.
Ep 6: La Doña – An attempt to blend a supernatural tale with a zombie story that could have worked but that descended into non-sensical trash with creepy Jesus bugs. (No, really.)
Tales of the Walking Dead should have been the show to revitalize, re-explore, and inject some life into the TWD franchise and keep it going for several more years. But instead, it seems to lack any sort of inspiration. I applaud their attempts to at least take some chances, but those instances just seemed awkward at best in this setting and downright bad at worst. This has been the lowest-rated of all the TWD shows so far, and that makes sense when they can’t even produce a good episode focused on the early years of Alpha. If this one does come back for a second season, it needs to make a clean start (which is easy for an anthology to do) and take a long, hard look back at the best years of TWD to understand what made it a great show. If it doesn’t come back (which is a very real possibility), it won’t be missed.
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