10 Reasons People Stopped Watching The Walking Dead

Some viewers are dead bored with this show.

By Mike Pedley /

Since bursting onto our screens back in 2010, AMC's The Walking Dead has become one of the biggest things on the small screen, proving many doubters wrong and showing that zombie and post-apocalypse stories can work as deep, thought-provoking TV shows. The show started exceptionally well, with some fantastic set-pieces and tense moments.

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However, for many people, what started out as a fascinating and character-driven look at a zombie-infested world has gradually declined into a monotonous, repetitive soap opera with some pretty embarrassing dialogue, slow-moving scenes, dull characters, and repetitive plot threads, so it's no surprise that millions of viewers have decided to call it quits.

The show remains one of the most-watched things on TV but ratings have drastically declined, especially during the last season, in which the average number of viewers was about half of the number the show was attracting during its peak years. The final episode of the latest season was seen live by almost 8 million people in the U.S., compared to nearly 16 million for season 5's finale.

Why are so many people giving up on The Walking Dead? Let's take a look.

10. Too Gruesome

Okay, The Walking Dead is all about rotting corpses rising from their graves to chow down on the living, so of course we expect violence and gore, but the show's recent events went a little too far for many viewers.

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Ardent comic readers will have known that the Glenn death scene was on the way, but few predicted that the showrunners would actually go full-on in their recreation of the comic's hideous image in which poor Glenn's skull is completely caved in. Negan was involved in more gruesome scenes in later episodes, torturing various people and even using an iron to burn one of his follower's faces.

The showrunners claimed they'd be toning down the violence in the wake of a wave of criticism, but the shocking manner of Glenn's death was one step too far for many TWD fans, with many claiming to have felt physically sick at the brutality on screen. In fact, the version shown in the U.K. had to be edited to remove some of the goriest shots. Even with the edit, some viewers called up Ofcom to lodge official complaints, while many others took to social media to share their disgust.

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