AMC’s adaptation of Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard’s The Walking Dead has experienced a wild trajectory in pop culture. As the show quickly became an overnight phenomenon, fans donned “If Daryl dies, we riot” t-shirts and argued over Sunday night cliffhangers during Monday morning “water cooler discussions.” You couldn’t escape the show's presence. In recent years, however, this fervor has diminished. The show’s ratings have gradually dipped (despite being consistently strong), and critics have cited listless, cyclical storytelling as the driving reason they “tapped out.” With the news of setting its upcoming spin-off The Walking Dead: World Beyond at two seasons, AMC may have found a way to avoid such diminishing returns.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one: a group of survivors work together in order to find a new home, only to have that home disturbed by a new threat. The threat is neutralized in some capacity, and then a new status quo is established, only to be destroyed by in-fighting and malicious forces. Also, there are zombies. Wash. Rinse. Repeat in perpetuity, like beating an (un)dead horse.
These are the broad strokes of every iteration of The Walking Dead in some capacity. In fact, they are the broad strokes of the vast majority of zombie fiction, which may be the biggest contributing factor to the dip in broad cultural appeal. This isn’t to say the sub-genre doesn’t have anything meaningful to say. Quite the contrary. Flesh-eating corpses have been a horror staple since the late 1960s due to their versatility as a metaphor for myriad social anxieties. The Walking Dead is a unique case as these strokes are repeated ad nauseam.
The reason for this in The Walking Dead is most likely due to the lack of limitations. In the comics, Kirkman and Adlard marched to the beat of their own drum for over a decade, right up until they suddenly ended the series in July of 2019 after a 193 issues. AMC’s adaptation has done much of the same, especially in terms of a faithful adaptation of the source material, but at least it has a rough template to follow now that the comic has completed its run.
The Walking Dead: World Beyond calling out its finish line in advance might be the most compelling aspect of the show. With twenty episodes for the cast and crew to play within, they’ll have to give viewers something different, or at the very least, exciting in order to recapture their imaginations. There is no room for meandering. In fact, some of the strongest stories from the comics in recent years were one-offs and backup stories. A 2016 digital one-shot by Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martín entitled The Alien was arguably one of the most compelling single issues to bear the name The Walking Dead. The story was tight, emotional, and said everything it needed to say within the confines of a single floppy. World Beyond could be the television equivalent, thus keeping things from stagnating.
Perhaps we should think of this new spin-off being limited to two seasons as something of a creative writing prompt. Instead of looking at a list of words and crafting a compelling story around it, AMC has set creative parameters in terms of length. This is something which has been beneficial to a lot of television shows. Once ABC gave the showrunners of Lost a designated episode count, the series picked up the pace and produced some of its best content. After all, artists need limitations to some degree. There’s no reason The Walking Dead, as a franchise, can’t shake the dust from off the bones of its own shared universe in order to give viewers something they didn’t know they wanted. Providing a show with a pre-established canvas size might just be the ticket to reclaim it's larger-than-life appeal.
Created by Scott Gimple, Robert Kirkman and Matt Negrete, The Walking Dead: World Beyond stars Aliyah Royale, Alexa Mansour, Annet Mahendru, Nicolas Cantu, Hal Cumpston and Nico Tortorella. It is scheduled to premiere on AMC in spring 2020.