I agree with this as far as season 7 and 8 but have really enjoyed seasons 9 and 10. Maybe they will leave asz at some point but I doubt it. They will likely introduce the commonwealth and nwo to bring fresh ideas and backdrops to the table. The fall in ratings could simply be the result of the mishandling of the saviors and TWD fatigue as a result of the long run of the show

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God I hate looking at articles that are in slideshow form. But I don't agree with what was said regarding Alexandria hurting the structure of the series. A lot of people have said in the past that they liked the traveling aspect of the series in the older seasons... but I don't get what was good about that?

It's not like Rick and Co. were even visiting diverse or exotic places back in the old seasons; they used to walk through generic forests and abandoned settlements in every other episode so how was that any better? And it's not like the group finding Alexandria changed that trend much; the group still ventures out into the world and we see forests and ghost towns on a regular basis.

 

I think the show is going to end in a couple seasons anyways so it doesn't matter anymore. But yeah post apocalyptic stories always work better when the group isn't settled down. That to go along with the cartoonish villains they have had over the past several years has definitely hurt interest in the series.

 

I more or less agree with this article. I much prefer to have them on the road. The uncertainty, to me, is one of the important highlights of this show. Having a comfortable base to deal with the Wolves, the Saviours and the Whisperers is 'good' but not overly exciting. The fact that they are going to the Commonwealth will mean their base will be even more comfortable. I do not read the comics and so I do not know what will happen there. But it will probably ASZ on a much grand scale. So, it will be more or less the same. Good but not very exciting. Nonetheless, I will keep watching.

 

Do you still watch?

 

My interest started to drop off about the same time Negan killed Abe and Glenn. I dunno. They just really sort of jumped the shark after that to me. Stopped watching pretty much entirely about a season and a half ago, when Rick left and they had the time jump thingy.

 

I think they definitely made the right decision by following the comics and having them settle down in ASZ. We've all seen what can happen when Gimple is the content manager over TV original material [*cough...FTWD seasons 4 and 5....*cough]. If they had made the decision to keep them on the road as nomads and scrap the comics starting at the end of S5, I think the show would have tanked. Probably lost a lot more viewers by S8 than it did with the Negan story line.

Plus, just in general, you can only have the group keep hopping from place to place as nomads for so long. Viewer fatigue is setting in even now, with the show changing and evolving so much. Imagine 10+ seasons of hopping around with no real place to live long term?

Saying that Alexandria hurt TWD is kind of like saying that hot sauce ruined your steak when the only other choice of flavoring was gasoline. Sure, maybe hot sauce wasn't the perfect match but at least its not used to power weed whackers.

My favorite years of TWD were when they were down and out, with a more uncertain future, as well. However, you can't keep that same cycle going forever. We will never know FOR SURE how it would have turned out if they had remained nomads after S5 under Gimple original material, but come on....we kinda know for sure. . I think blaming Alexandria for the fact that TWD is beyond its golden years really misses the logic of what happened here.

 

Maybe the basic premise of a zombie survival show has run its course, the same way a show about vampires (True Blood) ran its course long before the final episode. There’s only so many ways you can keep it interesting, and losing your core actors doesn’t help either. It was a great show when it started. S1E1 was a classic, and so were several others. But that was a long time ago.

 

Alexandria was absolutely necessary. For four and a half seasons our group was all about trying to find a place to live where they could feel relatively safe and where they could build a life that is perhaps a bit more than just surviving. Scavenging was becoming an increasingly unsustainable lifestyle, they needed to settle to grow things and have livestock. They needed walls.

So it was massively exciting for them to find a place like that, and the contrast between the sheltered pussycats, who lived in Alexandria right from the start, and our feral group was fascinating to watch. Then very quickly we (and they) started to realise that even Alexandria's walls were not going to keep them safe, neither from walkers, and definitely not from people. So different conflicts and problems followed.

By this stage we have had a pretty full picture of the perils of being on the road. There is so many times we could watch Daryl shooting owls for dinner, people desperately trying to restart cars and girls singing round the campfire. We had to move on.

No doubt the show has gradually changed genre. People who stuck with the show are either deeply invested in the characters, and/or interested in the rebuilding of life and society, not just the immediate after-effects of the apocalypse.