Declining quality of TWD

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Durgiun

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Dec 25, 2008
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It may just be me, but it seems The Walking Dead has begun a steady decline in quality, however only in the TV show and the comics.

The only good piece of media with TWD label are the games. Despite a hiccup concerning delays, Telltale produced consistently good stories with the first season, even after years of ''writing by the seat of their pants'' for other titles. Nothing could be further from the truth with the other incarnations.

As far back as I can remember, it all started with the 2nd season of the TV series - wherein all of the characters stood around talking about doing things or just talking about nothing without anything important happening. I'd accept the defense that it was for character development, but characters can only develop when shit happens, not when shit stagnates. And season 2 stagnated to hell and back. And with that, the facade began to crumble as I noticed more and more how the writing became insipid, simple. As if it was made for Joanne and Cletus from Frogballs, Nowhere. Simple, almost predictable dialogue about ''we must be human, we cannot kill durr''. The performances don't help any. They seem forced and the actors straining. Especially Andrew Lincoln who seems to think a Jack Bauer whisper and Jaden Smith forehead wrinkles a good actor make. The only actor who ever seemed really comfortable and at ease was David Morrissey. The cunning villain role just came naturally to the man. Whereas Lincoln always looks like he's holding in a turd.

And then we come to the most sacrosanct: the comic itself. The stories were OK, up until the Negan arc. It started out very promising. A man that has an almost cult like devotion from his followers, promising more destruction and violence than even the Governor himself. And yet, the man himself is particularly underwhelming and the whole interaction between his group and Rick's is standard.
''Fucking give the fuck up, you fucking fucks! FUCK!'' (note: this is a caricature of how Negan speaks)
-''No, you give up!''
*shootout*
Really, the comic is just retreading the same old ground as with the Prison/Governor arc. But hey, I could stomach it for a while. Maybe Kirkman had something more interesting planned. And oh my was I right. The 10th anniversary 12 part special. 2 issues a month, sans October and December. I was hyped. Finally, they'd have the means to move the story at a faster pace! Shit would finally go down!
And yet, in the three issues since, only two things have happened the Survivors and Saviours had a small firefight and a member of the Survivors got captured. That is literally all that happened in three issues. I dread to imagine how agonizingly slow the story will crawl now that Kirkman gets to rip his readers off for two issues a month (sans December). As if the previous volume (March to War) wasn't slow enough, All Out War is really pushing the boundaries of laziness.

When Crossed: Badlands has better written stories than your critically acclaimed comic does, I'd suggest just giving up because that is low.
 

Strazdas

Robots will replace your job
May 28, 2011
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The walking dead was declining in quality for the past.. 3 years now? The show has been bust since episode 5 of first season (meanwhile the beginning was really good).
 

EeveeElectro

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Aug 3, 2008
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I thought the first season was pretty damn awesome. Second season was a bit meh, but I heard they did have to make huge budget cuts which resulted in the lack of zombies and such. Season 3 was very good, especially halfway through and the fight with Michonne and The Governor had me on the edge of my seat.
Season 4 so far has been quite disappointing. The episode just gone was AMAZING, I thought. But the two episodes before were slow, dull and boring. Then there was only really the one before that I enjoyed, so I've only really liked 2 episodes so far :/

I will keep watching it because I have TV watching stubbornness syndrome.
 

Teriver

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Nov 22, 2013
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I tend to find, at least with the tv show, that it is a very good start, good ending, terrible middle show.

A lot of stuff happens at the start of each season to open up some story lines. A lot of stuff happens at the end each season to close these story lines. Every episode in between is the survivors ambling around complaining about the open story lines... with the occasional zombie related death thrown in.

The first season was definitely the best because it was short. The first half of season 4 that ended recently was good, because it was short. Season two was terrible (to a lesser extend season three as well), because it was long and almost nothing but filler.

The longer that a season or story arc goes onin TWD, the more terrible filler it has. And because they are making longer and longer seasons and story arcs then the quality will decline as a result.
 

Directionless

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Nov 4, 2013
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TWD show is probably the worst highly rated drama i've seen. It is just such a tedious show. That's how it feels when i watch it, it feels like i am taking part in a tedious task.

It was alright for the first season, and even parts of the second season. But when they hit that prison, mentally i felt like Vito Scalletta moving those crates for absolutely no bloody reason.
 

BloatedGuppy

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Feb 3, 2010
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Directionless said:
TWD show is probably the worst highly rated drama i've seen.
It's certainly up there. I've often referred to it as the "worst good show on TV", and sometimes the latter half of that equation is in doubt. It tends to pull off enough boffo episodes and cool moments to keep afloat, and (IMO) the show has slowly improved as its shed many of the ghastly casting errors it made early in its run (Lori, Andrea, Dale...) and enjoyed a gradually rising budget. Low budget and bad acting aside, there are a couple of persistent issues that hold the show back.

1. The zombie drama is weak. It's very hard to make slow zombies remotely threatening without creating insanely contrived circumstances. A threat you can Very Slowly Walk Away From is not much of a threat, so you see a lot of conspicuous dangling of limbs in exposed positions, or surprise last second leg injuries, or inadvisable journeys into confined spaces in order to create scenarios wherein the heroes cannot just shrug and amble off at the sight of a zombie. The fact the entire camp is apparently full of dead eye snipers doesn't help.

2. The human drama is even weaker. Everyone has two modes...sainted hero/man of the people, or mad dog killer. The show's inability to explore shades of grey without turning characters into Chaotic Stupid psychopaths (Shane, The Governor) is perhaps its greatest failing. If the zombies are weak (and expensive) you have to make sure the human drama is the meat of the experience, and it's been anything but.
 

Silvanus

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Jan 15, 2013
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The first season was great; the first season finale is still my favourite episode. It's never been as good since, I agree, it's lowest point being the eight-hundredth episode on the farm. Like EeveeElectro, I too suffer from stubbornness syndrome and continue to watch it anyway.

The only show to decline so much in quality that I gave up after an extended period was Lost, and TWD is still far better than post-third season Lost.
 

Tom_green_day

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Jan 5, 2013
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The first series was brilliant, second and third not so much but I really think the fourth is probably my second favourite so far. It's shrugged off the problems of the previous two series and is much more interesting now. I like the way that characters don't simply fit the 'super good' or 'anti-hero' mould. Like that short-haired woman, what she did with the two ill people and her justification was a really interesting shade of grey morality, and Rick who is always struggling to be the heroic leader that loads of stories have, and usually falling short.
And the blonde girl is hot.
 

Legion

Were it so easy
Oct 2, 2008
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My largest issue with The Walking Dead television show is that they are surviving a zombie apocalypse, yet the greatest threat they face seems to be their own stupidity. The vast majority of problems they have faced beyond the simplest aspects (food and shelter) have almost entirely been caused by one or more people doing something completely idiotic.

For the most part I'd actually say the latest season has been much better than the one before. At least in this case they have been facing problems outside of their control, as opposed to bringing it upon themselves. Although this was ruined somewhat by them handling it in a typically moronic fashion.

Like when they wanted to distract the zombies away from the fences by sacrificing the pigs. The zombies where already distracted by the sound of the car and Rick sitting in the back. They could have easily distracted them using gunfire or driving just too fast for them to catch up. The only reason they killed the pigs was to make it seem more dramatic and urgent than it actually was.

Although my largest issue is that nobody has put a bullet in The Governor yet. It gets kind of irritating seeing how many people fall for his act.
 

Jacco

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May 1, 2011
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Walking Dead's problem is not the concept, it's the writing and execution. It in many ways, it's like Call of Duty. Some faceless producer comes up with a handful of awesome set piece moments to include throughout the season (like the prison battle in the latest episode) so people stay tuned and the writers go from there. The problem with that is that the writers have to build out from the defined set pieces and it causes the story to become disjointed and poorly linked.

A serial show like TWD needs to focus on telling a self confined story. Ideally, it should be written like a novel, with each episode acting like a chapter of the book. That would (with any half way decent writers) allow a concise and tight story to be told without dangling plot lines or contrived events to move to the next set piece. A good example of this is the brief radio message Daryl and company heard in the car before being attacked by the zombies. It was brief, and then they got attacked and nothing has been said of it since because it then went into the useless governor episodes and finally the prison fight. That's simply poor writing.
 

dyre

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Mar 30, 2011
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Directionless said:
It is just such a tedious show. That's how it feels when i watch it, it feels like i am taking part in a tedious task.
Tedious is a good word for it. I've been trying off and on to get into the show, but I just find all the characters to be utterly unsympathetic (as in, I don't care about them at all).
 

RedDeadFred

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May 13, 2009
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I liked the first season.
I thought the second season was okay.
I hated the third season.
I stopped watching the show and haven't seen any of the fourth season.
 

CarlsonAndPeeters

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Mar 18, 2009
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Haven't watched the show, but I had to give up on the comic shortly after issue 100. I loved it back in the beginning, up to and past the Governor arc, but after the 100th issue I realized that I had been bored with it for a while and was just sticking around to see what they would do to shake it up. And I was disappointed.

Killing characters people like just because you can is not interesting. It does not make you a good writer. It does not make you revolutionary. Yes it can be important, and I'm not complaining that Glenn died: I'm complaining that he died for no other reason than to seemingly make people upset. It's gotta be motivated by the plot, not by the need to give the audience a kneejerk emotional reaction. Because that abrupt reaction will fade and then you're left with a mess of a storyline to clean up

I enjoyed the time I spent reading TWD, but now its gone and soon forgotten from my life.
 

Kenbo Slice

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Jun 7, 2010
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The tv show was never that good. Season 1 was okay, but season 2 was insanely boring. I haven't seen season 3 or 4 and frankly I don't want to. I'm tired of people thinking that people making terrible decisions makes for a good drama. Like, how many bad decisions can these people fucking make? Are they mentally handicapped or something?
 

Robert Marrs

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Mar 26, 2013
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I tried to watch the show. Loved the first season and had high hopes but by the time I was done with the second series I had pretty much given up. It got very boring very fast. The telltale series is really good but being forced to restart part 4 about 6 times due to it not saving my progress talked me into never playing it again.
 

Spaceman Spiff

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Sep 23, 2013
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I think the TV show is damn good, especially compared to most of the trash that passes for entertainment today. The last episode had me pretty excited and I even laughed out loud when the little blonde girl shot that woman in the head.

I have no opinion on the game or comic as I haven't played/read them.
 

Vigormortis

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Nov 21, 2007
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I've noticed that, if there's a popular show[footnote]Or video game, for that matter.[/footnote] that isn't Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, people around this forum will complain about it. Calling it overrated or "the worst of the best".

Just look at the incessant Doctor Who "declining quality" discussions.

But hey, to each their own. Everyone's welcome to like, or whine about, anything they like.

Personally, I feel that the quality of the show has only risen since season 2. Others will disagree. Some will even insist season 2 was the best. But for me, it's only gotten better. (mostly)

It's certainly not the greatest show I've ever seen, though.
 

Qage

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Sep 11, 2013
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If I were ever asked "Would you recommend The Walking Dead?" my response would be, "Watch the first season, Wikipedia the second, and then watch the third season." Personally, I thought season 2 was absolutely terrible, especially in comparison to season 1 which was really good from start to finish. I have since stopped watching since around the middle of season 3, mostly because I feel like the show is rather predictable, it's always obvious when characters are getting set up to be killed off because they just suddenly make a stupid decision that doesn't follow any kind of logic, even if they've been perfectly rational up until that point.
 

Drummodino

Can't Stop the Bop
Jan 2, 2011
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Up until last night's episode I was enjoying season 4. I liked the introduction of a new non-zombie, non-human threat. I thought Hershel was great and I liked the two solo Governor episodes.

But seeing him flip straight back to the way he was in season 3 pissed me off immensely. What was the point of that whole arc?

Honestly I think I'm done with the show now. Season 1 and the first half of season 3 were great, but I don't think I can take any more stupid/hypocritical characters or terrible writing.