The Walking Dead: 8 Reasons The Season 7 Premiere Was A Failure
The Walking Dead has finally shuffled off the deep end.
Ratings for the Season 7 premiere of The Walking Dead on Sunday night hit a near all-time high, which for a seventh season is pretty damn impressive. Along with the news that an eighth has already been green-lit, it's safe to assume that The Walking Dead will be a part of the TV schedule for years to come.
Shame the ratings don't reflect the quality.
The show is clearly hugely popular, but popularity does not always constitute excellence, and The Walking Dead has been met with criticism since around episode 2. Most would agree that the second season was a snore, and with the sheer quantity of high calibre television being produced these days The Walking Dead often conjures the feeling that it is squandering the clear storytelling potential.
Unfortunately, the premiere of Season 7 encapsulated everything wrong with The Walking Dead in a 45 minute onslaught. Not in viewership perhaps, but certainly in storytelling.
8. Proved The Cliffhanger Was A Mistake
The cliffhanger that ended Season 6 unashamedly divided the fan base. Some saw it as a ballsy move, while others saw it as a manipulative sidestep. Whichever camp you fall into, a show as popular as The Walking Dead does not need gimmicks and lazy suspense to get people watching, so why do it? This was not even an intelligent cliffhanger, it was merely an attempt to get people talking and painfully extract some false gratification by making us guess who got close to Lucille.
This kind of cheap trick is more akin to a soap opera than an intelligent drama series.
Over the course of six months the internet discussed and speculated every possible scenario and we waited, some admittedly with bated breath, to see what the writers would come up with. Turns out the outcome was something a shed load of people had already surmised.
Not only this, but the cliffhanger itself ended up being something of a ruse when paired with the events from the premiere, evidently showing that The Walking Dead has now become more about deceiving their audience rather than rewarding them.