The Walking Dead: Ranking Every Season From Worst To Best
Separating the survivors from the walker-fodder...
In 2010, AMC’'s zombie drama of survival horror swept the globe almost as quickly as its central walkers overran the planet, a smash hit from its debut episode. With the audience swelling year after year, it’s fair to say we’ve been infected, and nothing short of a few more whacks from Lucille will cause the numbers to dwindle.
Over the course of the decade, the show has progressively morphed from a story about the dawn of the zombie apocalypse into a study of the disintegration of what it means to be human, with morals and values becoming obsolete impediments to pure survival.
Increasingly bloodthirsty and unforgiving to its characters, all of whom are in constant danger from all fronts, they're forced to do whatever’s necessary to stay alive for another day against multiple manifestations of threats, walkers and humans alike.
While the show has seen better days, it’s been affirmed that no end is in sight just yet. With multiple future seasons planned and outlined, its creators fully confident that our hunger for zombie action won’t be subsiding anytime soon.
With the latest season wrapped and entered into the pantheon of television history, it’s time to take a look back and see how each of the show’s seven seasons so far stack up against each other. Open, dead inside.
7. Season 7 (2016-17)
A joyless slog from start to finish, season 7 was hurt badly by an underwhelming antagonist and the sidelining of the show’s best characters. Negan’s introduction at the end of season 6 immediately started the character off on the wrong foot with audiences, killing an unidentified character in one of the cheapest cliff hangers in recent memory.
He failed from then on to endear himself as a villain, quite literally a cartoon character devoid of added dimensions or depth, and one who endlessly repeated the same tired speeches of superiority while stroking his barbed Lucille episode after episode. With Carol mostly inactive, Daryl imprisoned for the first half, and Morgan mired in a tedious arc of shattered pacifism, the show felt too fractured, with too few moments of heart to make all the misery bearable.
The whole season was built around first setting up and then delivering on Rick’s call to arms, and an eventual rebellion by several clans against Negan and his Saviors, but was paced so sluggishly, in such a dull manner, that the climax failed to achieve any real sense of catharsis or even anticipation for next year. When an entire season so ponderously sets the pieces on the board, it’s hard to feel much excitement for the game that’s coming.
The hope is that the past year was a necessary evil that moved everything into place for an intense arc of war next season, but that in itself does nothing to make season 7 one that fans are eager to revisit.
Best Episode: New Best Friends - Thrusting Rick into a gladiator duel with a spike-armoured walker in a pit of trash provided a touch of much needed pulp and popcorn entertainment for a season sorely lacking in creative moments.
Worst Episode: The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be - When the season premiere revealed Negan to have gruesomely murdered first Abraham and then Glenn, it set an unwelcomely nihilistic tone of sadism and brutality for a season that largely persisted in its bleakness throughout the year. The promise of hope followed by its cruel withdrawal had been repeated time and time again even before this season, and this was a low point.