AMC’s adaptation of Image Comics’ seminal zombie apocalypse series The Walking Dead has taken a bit of a beating over the course of the past couple seasons by fans and critics alike. Now, don’t shed tears for the show just yet; it’s still a ratings juggernaut, surpassing every other show on cable in its time slot by a huge margin. But ever since the Season 5 premiere, in which Carol, everyone’s favorite June Cleaver turned butt-kicking zombie assassin goes all Rambo on a bunch of cannibals to save Rick and Company, rating have seen a bit of a dip.

In All Fairness, It’s Hard To Top Carol's Big Moment

In fact, except for the Season 7 premiere, the ratings haven’t been anywhere near those once-heady numbers, and the only real reason they spiked then was because the world wanted to know who got their skull caved in by Negan’s baseball bat, Lucille. After the reveal, ratings took their biggest dip between season premiere and second episode in the show’s history, leaving some pundits and fans wondering if The Walking Dead was past its prime.

walking-dead-carol

Despite the downturn in ratings, which, again, are by no means bad, the show still has a lot of gas in its engine. In fact, there are some things Season 8 can do to get back in fans’ good graces. All the elements are there, and they always have been. The show just needs to make a few small leaps of faith, and work outside its own blood-splattered comfort zone.

This Guy…

Right off the bat (pun, totally intended) Negan needs to be more likable. This may sound like a crazy notion considering the atrocious acts he’s perpetrated against some of our beloved (and not so beloved) characters since his introduction in the Season 6 finale. The issue with Negan isn’t that he’s a monster, however -- it’s that he’s monster we don’t understand. The best villains are characters with whom you can empathize. You may not agree with their methods, but you see their reasoning, and if you were in their blood-caked boots, you may do the same, too.

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In the comics, Negan is a warped, mirror version of Rick taken to the logical (albeit quite primal) extreme. The reader understands that Rick is one step away from being Negan, and if given the right circumstances, he’d slip into tyrannical governing (something he’s already dabbled with in the show) in no time, flat. The comic book version of Negan represents balance, but in the show, he’s pure chaos, which can only go so far. If viewers can’t come to like him, at the very least, they need understand Negan's motivations, to see through his eyes no matter how awful the view might be. Which leads to an issue the show has always faced: Putting conflict above characters.

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Give Us All The Righteous Indignation!

Creator Robert Kirkman has been quoted saying that his comic The Walking Dead is basically a soap opera that happens to feature zombies. The show strives to emulate this, but all too often winds up being a pulp melodrama that happens to feature zombies. What’s the difference, you may ask? Well, in soap operas, we get to know the characters through their choices and interactions with their surroundings over a long period of time. They’re developed in the lulls, while the conflicts that arise define them and the series they inhabit.

In The Walking Dead, most of the characters are slight, mere fodder for the story instead of being developed into unique personalities. Remember how much backlash Season 2 got for being boring? Well, it may sound silly now, but that was when the series was on the right track to be what it should have become. It’s just a shame that a lot of the more interesting character developments that were introduced didn’t go anywhere. Instead, the season was 75% Rick telling Carl to stay in the house, 20% Carl not staying in the house, 4% farm work, and 1% lines spoken by T-Dog.

Rest In Peace, You Beautiful Prince.

Speaking of T-Dog, another thing Season 8 could benefit from is easing up on the heavy-handed foreshadowing. Whenever a character who has either previously been side-lined or completely ignored suddenly gets an exuberant amount of screen time in an episode, it’s a dead giveaway that they’re zombie chow. Honestly, it’s lazy writing, and these characters, and the actors who play them, really deserve better.

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The show doesn’t need to spend time trying to trick the audience into loving a character, only to be devastated when they die. The Walking Dead just needs to let us come to those emotions organically. You know, like how we hate Lori in the comics. That didn’t happen overnight.

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Good Riddance

The other side of this coin is the show’s abuse of bottle episodes. Look, any series that’s been on as long as The Walking Dead is going to have a few isolated, character-centric episodes under its belt. It’s to be expected. However, when you’re dealing with an ensemble cast of this magnitude, it’s best to juggle them around instead of separating them for what seems like seasons at a time.

The only time these bottle episodes are warranted is if they lend some compelling backstory for a character that contains dire information that could not have been presented in the show itself or through natural exposition, but we don’t need a whole episode with Tara entangled with a group of female survivalists. While as a standalone story line, it’s good, it should have been a “Hey, we’ll check back in on you before the last commercial break” sort of situation of the course of a couple episodes.

Who Are These People?

There is a recent development in The Walking Dead that many viewers who are familiar with the source material found quite curious: With a few small exceptions (i.e. garbage people), after Negan’s introduction, the show was following the comic pretty darn closely. Most of the plot beats and the order in which characters are introduced and depart were identical. What was even more jarring is that some of the comic’s dialogue (which is pretty much always stellar) was being ripped right from the page and spoken by the characters in the show.

While this may bring up a discussion regarding adaptation versus interpretation, the show was actually at its best when it deviated from the comic book series. Consider the character of Daryl, for a moment. This guy has never been in the comics, but he's become the poster boy for the television show. And, as we mentioned earlier, Carol is awesome in the show while her comic book counterpart had very little to do besides being a love interest for Tyrese and feeding herself to zombies after a mental breakdown. Yeah, the television version is way cooler.

Switching things up makes things fresh for readers of the comic series, while also making it difficult for nonreaders to be spoiled by what’s going to happen by looking it up on a Wiki. Deviations are fine. In fact, small changes and improved characters are welcomed. The tone of the comic, however, should translate over to the show a little better, or at the very least be a little more consistent.

It’s On like Donkey Kong… Or, Rather, Whack-a-Mole

The Walking Dead comic does a great job of presenting story arcs that stand on their own while connecting to the overall scope of the series. Many of these arcs operate in certain sub-genres or have their own identity and tone. For instance, “Fear the Hunters” could almost be read outside the main continuity as a standalone TWD tale, and the show took that story and turned it into three of the best episodes the it has ever produced.

The promotional material for Season 8 has grindhouse action film written all over it. If this season does take this route, fans should be in for a treat. After all, the show is adapting the comic’s massive, twelve-issue epic story “All Out War,” and if any season is going to play like an action movie, it should be season eight. However, if any it is anything like previous seasons, audiences may be hoodwinked by getting two or three fantastic set pieces (likely relegated to the premiere and mid-season finale) and a bunch of scenes of Rick telling various survivors that he’ll do everything to keep them safe while also cogently explaining how they are never safe.