5. Characters With Some Dimension
You know what was amazing? How the video game edition of The Walking Dead left most people who played it near tears by the time it was over. It was a horribly heart-wrenching, agonizing experience that was about as long as half a season of the show and a hundred times more engaging. Why? Because the characters mattered. Sure, you could engage them on a level that you never could engage a television character, that's just the nature of a game - especially one founded almost totally on choice. But they also mattered because they had depth. Lee was conflicted and wasn't really a good person before civilization ended, but he wasn't a bad person once things went pear-shaped. Kenny, a "normal" dude in a past life, became much more of a grey area when things went south and he was left with a family to care for and no obvious answers on how to do it. And then there was Clementine, a child who had to learn how to live in this new world and had only a convicted criminal to show her how. The characters had depth, there was a dimension to them that simply doesn't exist on the show. It's easier to create that when your audience literally controls every step and every choice, but good writing is good writing and a layered character is a layered character no matter the medium. The show needs to give viewers more than characters with a single defining characteristic each, and it can look under its very own licensing umbrella to see how to do it.