10 TV Shows That Were Right To Deviate From The Source Material

7. The Walking Dead

In a similar fashion to Arrow, The Walking Dead is an adaptation from a long-running comic book, and in a similar fashion, had to consider condensing that narrative and all those characters to a more manageable level that could be parcelled out into seasons (of varying length) on a cable TV show. The difference, for the most part, came with the story structure. While the producers of Arrow had seven decades of loosely-connected stories and characters to draw from to create their own singular narrative, The Walking Dead was a comic that had been running with a single writer, Robert Kirkman, and a single ongoing story for seven years. The producers of the television show had to figure out how best to fit the story and characters they had to the television format. Inevitably, some things that work perfectly fine in a black and white comic don€™t come over so well in HD. Moreover, one of those producers developing the show was Kirkman himself, who had a pretty hands on experience and was, from all reports, delighted at the opportunity to work with a writer€™s room in expanding and extrapolating on ideas and concepts that he hadn€™t had time or space to get into when writing the comic book. The Walking Dead, then, can be considered a collaboration between the original material and the newer material: a separate but intrinsically linked entity. For the most part, Kirkman and fans of the comic are more than happy with the arrangement, being easily able to keep the two aspects of the property distinct and separate.