This list contains MAJOR SPOILERS for Season 6 of The Walking Dead and some light spoilers for future comics storylines.
Heading into its seventh season this October, The Walking Dead remains a true TV juggernaut with some of the biggest ratings on US TV and a constant spot at the heart of the ongoing pop culture conversation, but it’s stumbled a bit creatively in recent times, developing lazy and frustrating storytelling habits as it struggles under the weight of a bloated ensemble that it often fails to truly service.
However, as the show enters one of the most compelling and unpredictable arcs thus far in the form of the conflict between Rick’s group and Negan, season seven has every opportunity to right the course and recover some of the show’s former glory.
To coincide with the release of the trailer at the show’s San Diego Comic Con panel, here are five ways The Walking Dead can improve when it returns this autumn…
1. Plenty of Negan
This may sound a touch obvious, but it’s a tip the show would do well to follow. ‘Last Day on Earth’ may have been a slog of an episode that ended on a particularly misjudged cliffhanger, but it gave a really effective introduction to Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s interpretation of mega-villain, Negan, displaying how much of an asset Negan could be to the show going forwards.
With that in mind, the best way to use Negan may be to keep him as an almost omnipresent figure. He’s a bold, brash character who exudes a smug self-confidence and a love of his own voice that’s rarely found in the more introspective cast of heroes, and there would be real dramatic value in really exploring the way in which he acts almost as the playground bully to those he’s conscripted, forcing them into a new way of life that leaves absolutely no room for old, comfortable patterns.
That would be hard to show if Negan is only sparingly seen in the same way the Governor was in season four just before the prison battle, so here’s hoping that TWD uses Morgan’s recent upgrade to series regular wisely to ensure that the threat of Negan is consistent and doesn’t fall by the wayside every now and then while the show explores other plotlines. Plus, he’s just plain fun to watch, and Morgan’s jovial showman shtick could really inject some levity and humour into what can be a depressingly dour show.
2. Keep the cast together
Under Scott Gimple, The Walking Dead has dedicated just about one half of each season to a fragmented narrative in which the cast are split up into smaller groups due to some kind of crisis – whether it’s the fall of the prison in Season 4, the hospital arc in Season 5 or the walker herd in season 6, Gimple has always been wary of keeping the entire ensemble in one place for too long.
That’s great on paper, and it has admittedly allowed at times for a more incisive and in-depth exploration of side characters than the ‘ensemble’ episodes have with a greater amount of time in the limelight for characters who might otherwise get lost in the shuffle. However, more often than not, it’s simply slowed the ongoing story to a crawl, delaying pay-offs and resolutions on cliffhangers for episodes on end as the show scrambles to service every group’s disparate story.
It’s what happened with Glenn in Season 6, whose ‘death’ wasn’t revisited for four episodes as entirely different groups got an episode in the limelight, a clear display of how the splitting up of character simply hinders the narrative’s momentum and dilutes its focus on the actual story.
With the cast kept broadly together in one or two places, The Walking Dead has often sparked to life with brisk pacing and fun interplay between characters as they each fill an unexpected role within a larger jigsaw – to look at Season 6 again, the best stretches of that run came when the show focused upon large chunks of the ensemble at a time (at the start of both halves), thus allowing for a lot more progress in each character’s story and a more streamlined narrative.
There’ll doubtless be some level of separation in season 7, but a tighter focus and broader roster of characters per episode could help the Negan story to circumvent the bloat that weighed down the walker herd and hospital stories in the past.
3. Delve into the larger world
The second half of Season 6 was labelled ‘A Larger World’ in marketing, and it’s easy to see why, with the spring episodes revealing the hitherto unseen Hilltop Colony, Negan’s group of Saviors and an as-yet-unnamed new group involving men clad in armour who rescued Carol and Morgan in the finale.
The season didn’t really have too much time to really explore these ideas in depth, however, and the Hilltop in particular got very short shrift after its introduction episode in the long march towards Negan’s introduction.
With the basic building blocks there for a fully-fleshed out civilisation, Season 7 needs to really expand upon those foundations if it’s going to really sell this larger world Rick and co have sound themselves in. For one, exploring the culture, hierarchy and moral code of the Saviours would go a long way to elevating them above the blank-slate goons with abilities ranging from incompetent to genius-level depending upon the plot’s requirement, so an extended trip back to their base, known as the Sanctuary in the comics, ought to be due.
Likewise, the Hilltop and this new colony (which is most likely the Kingdom, led by the eccentric Ezekiel) need to really feel like living, breathing communities that exist everyday outside the events of the narrative – in the slightly rushed ‘Knots Untie’, the Hilltop felt a bit sparse and empty, a mere venue for the events of that episode rather than a place with its own society, so an extended bit of world building may be in order if the show is to really use these communities as major parts of the story going forward.
4. Thin the herd
Having mentioned the ever-growing ensemble The Walking Dead sports, clocking in at 20 series regulars this season, it may be time for that ensemble to be cut back a great deal. TWD once had a great deal of notoriety for its freewheeling tendency to kill off major characters at completely unexpected moments like Lori and Beth, but it’s become more conservative in the last couple of years, as displayed by Season 6’s low death count in which the only major deaths were characters introduced in the past two seasons.
A smaller, more streamlined ensemble would allow TWD to focus more heavily upon the central characters who’ve been mainstays since the show’s early days and bring them to genuinely original new places, while devoting more time to fleshing out side characters who are compelling in their own right.
Right now, there’s a feeling that there’s always a handful too many main characters to focus on, meaning that some become peripheral, like Carl, or entirely irrelevant, like Aaron, for vast swathes of time, which comes across as a bit of a waste of talented actors who simply don’t get enough material.
Obviously, there’ll be one major character, the victim of Lucille, leaving the show (ahem) right off the bat at the start of Season 7, but it may be wise for TWD to go a bit further. There’s a balance to be struck and too many deaths can make the whole plot device cheap and frustrating, but a slightly bolder attitude towards culling important characters could be exactly what the show needs to regain its focus.
5. Fewer cheap tricks
Arguably, the cruxes of Season 6’s flaws were two particular moments that loomed large over the season, dominating the solid storytelling to be found elsewhere with their frustrating, insubstantial cheapness. Those two moments, of course, were the Glenn fake-out and the cliffhanger with Negan.
In the case of Glenn, this was simply a case of providing a powerful shock with absolutely nothing of substance behind it. Glenn falling off the dumpster and seemingly getting ripped to shreds came out of nowhere, but it was, at the time, a vintage ‘what the hell just happened?’ moment that seemed like a bold statement of intent for the season going forward, underlining clearly that no-one was safe.
When Glenn was revealed to be alive after an ill-informed wait, that message had been reversed – with the fake camera trickery providing the illusion of Glenn’s death, it was clear that The Walking Dead had become timid and afraid of killing off major characters; the riskiest move it could pull off, according to this twist, was simply to make it seem like it could.
That undermined the show’s vaunted reputation as a series in which no-one is safe and illustrated how it was beginning to falsely manipulate the audience into believing something instead of earning that surprise with twists that had a lasting impact. Some interpreted this as a growing contempt for the audience and a prioritization of ratings and media hype over storytelling, and the Negan cliffhanger served to essentially validate that concern once and for all, with the choice to end on a mysterious point-of-view show of Negan’s unlucky victim simply undermining all the portentous build-up that had come before.
This left a bad taste in a lot of viewers’ mouths, particularly because the show had an open goal to adapt the scene in full, complete with victim, in the finale in a way that would retain the power of the moment while still allowing the chance for a ‘what happens next?’ cliffhanger to keep people talking over the hiatus.
In Season 7, therefore, it’s paramount that The Walking Dead needs to kick this habit if it’s going to recover the critical acclaim and storytelling prowess that it often sports.
There will be lots of opportunities for huge cliffhangers and twists ahead, if the comics are any indication, but these cliffhangers will need to organically emerge from the story and simply work because they urge people to see how the story will be continued, not because the show has opted to artificially hold back certain information in order to draw out the buzz and conversation a while longer.
If it can do that, then TWD will be a long way towards recovery.
> Buy the complete Seasons 1-5 boxset on Amazon.
What do you want to see in Season 7? Let us know below…