The other night I finally got around to watching the first episode from series seven of The Walking Dead. Season six ended on a cliffhanger – a major character or characters would die – but thanks to corporate greed, it was months before I could learn the resolution via iTunes. I avoided spoilers, somehow, so I watched that episode with genuine anticipation.
What I got was idiotic torture porn with pretensions to something superior.
The Walking Dead had no more avid fan than I in its early seasons, but during seasons five and six it began to labour under its own burgeoning weight. This is a common problem for television series, because repetition sets in and credulity begins to stretch. In the case of The Walking Dead, the repetitiveness was in characters finding sanctuary and then having it destroyed or taken away from them again and again. I could tolerate it, though, because the writing was still taut and inventive, the characters still interesting, the themes still potent.
But episode one of season seven failed in every measure.
The new villain of the piece, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is a caricature of those that came before him, a one-dimensional wisecracking lunatic better suited to a lame horror movie franchise. The deaths, when they came, had little emotional impact thanks to the cartoonish violence that delivered them. And, even worse, the deaths disrespected the storyline and character arcs up to that point. There was a dumb meaninglessness to them – as if I were watching Game of Thrones rather than The Walking Dead. It was a poor facsimile of itself.
A few seasons into The Walking Dead, a mate of mine lamented how much the source material (it’s based on a series of comics) had been stretched out to accommodate the televisual medium. I didn’t agree with him at the time, but I certainly agree with him now.
Of course, The Walking Dead is hardly alone in falling victim to excessive longevity. Every successful television show, from The Fugitive to Happy Days, The Incredible Hulk and The X-Files, has faltered in quality when the almighty ad dollar demanded it keep performing past its prime. Even sitcoms can fall victim to it; The Big Bang Theory and The IT Crowd were brilliant comedies when they focused on nerdy foibles, but lost their edge when the writers ran out of ideas and resorted to sitcom clichés.
I feel much the same way about long book series. Two that come to mind are Game of Thrones and Harry Potter. In each case I enjoyed the early instalments, but by book three I began to develop a sense of boring déjà vu. A professional writer can expand an idea to any length, but that doesn’t mean he or she should. Usually when an idea hits it comes pre-packaged with an ideal length, and any attempt to ignore this will result in ever-diminishing quality.
Will I watch the rest of The Walking Dead? A large part of me still wants to. I became invested in the main characters over scores of hours and several years. But perhaps I would be better served if I bought the comics books instead – a piece of string cut to the proper length.