After a soggy season 7A, The Walking Dead needs some help getting back on track.
We offer some solutions.
ThisWalking Deadarticle contains spoilers for the TV show and comic.
There is a malaise surrounding cable TVs most popular scripted show.
Ratings forThe Walking Deadare down across the board.
Perhaps this is to be expected with any show going into its seventh season.
Nothing can gain viewers and influence people forever.
Unfortunately, there has been an equally troubling slide in the creative output for the show.
Our ownWalking Deadcritic-in-residences reviews have includedincreasingly desperate pleasto cut down on episode length in season 7A*.
The plot is right in the heart of Robert Kirkmans comic book series.
Where and how could things go so wrong?
There are a couple of answers at play here, that both kind of feed into each other.
The first is strangely enough: stability.
Stability seems like it would be a good thing for a TV show and oftentimes that is the case.
*The Walking Deads connection siblings offer two excellent examples.
BothMad MenandBreaking Badrepresented the full, compromised visions of Matthew Weiner and Vince Gilligan, respectively.
Creative consistency worked for those shows as it does for most shows.
Filmmaker Frank Darabont was the person who did the most to bringThe Walking Deadcomic adaptation to air.
Darabont was a Weiner/Gilligan-style auteur to the bone and brought along his own unique vision to the show.
This largely involved massive deviations from the source material and sometimes intriguing, sometimes boring elements of melodrama.
AMC fired him halfway through season two over creative disputes and appointed his protege Glen Mazzara to showrunner.
AMC had lost two showrunners from the highest rated scripted show on television within 18 months.
They then elevated writer Scott Gimple to the position of showrunner prior to the shows fourth season.
The show that Gimple inherited must have been an absolute shitshow behind the scenes.
Still Gimple was able to create some worthwhile television out of it.
Gimple was best known for writing the popular 18 Months Out and Clear episodes of the show.
They were both slower-moving, more introspective episodes but they undoubtedly worked.
Gimple brought that smaller-story-writing sensibility along with an increased reverence for Kirkmans source material to seasons four and five.
The front half of season four was exciting but shallow, while the back half was slow-moving but substantive.
Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened.
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Its not Gimples fault the show is suffering creatively.
Hes a talented writer and by all indication a talented showrunner as well.
But the model under whichThe Walking Deadis set up doesnt need a permanent showrunner.
Which leads us to the second issue withThe Walking Dead: it is adapting the comics too faithfully.
Adapting a comic book to a TV show or movie should seem like a slam dunk.
The Batman analog is slightly depressive with a dad bod.
And at least two other heroes are just garden-variety sociopaths.
Watchmenwas translated to film almost as literally as possible, with one large deviation to the ending.
*I maintain that the ending of Watchmen the movie is better than the ending of the comic.
The Walking Deadis currently experiencing that same issue.
Lets just take a quick walk back through season 7As episodes to see how faithfully adapted they are.
Season 7A ofThe Walking Deadcovers issues 100 through 112 almost in their entirety.
It begins with the iconic lineup in which Negan bashes Glenns brains in with Lucille.
The only real difference being that Abraham is killed as well, just two issues after his comic counterpart.
The whole thing seems predictable and obligatory, not fresh and exciting.
Comic book readers were pleased to see an episode that was lifted almost entirely from the comics.
But that isnt necessarily a good thing.
Adaptation is an art.
Its not just carbon copying.
Some of this stuff is cool and some of this stuff works, but too much of it doesnt.
It makes everything feel like a sound stage.
The comics demanded the introduction of a larger world for the TV show.
Now its a group of actors on sets reciting lines.
So its time forThe Walking Deadto free itself of its comic constraints.
Not that the comic is necessarily constraining if anything its too expansive.
Im not even suggesting that the show abandon the All Out War plot line to come.
But they have to do something different.
Thats not chaotic enough.
Thats not fun enough.
A show about the dead walking the Earth should be surprising and chaotic.
The Walking Dead, like all good television, is a collection of poignant, empathetic moments.
The show deserves to find and create its own moments instead of borrowing them from another source.
Because those dont always fit.
The second half ofThe Walking Deadseason 7 premieres on Feb. 12.
