About a decade and a couple of months ago, I reviewed the adventure game with the same name, set in the same universe as the TV show. The TV show debuted a couple of years before the game, while the comic book came out almost a decade earlier, making the franchise about two decades old. The world has changed quite a bit meanwhile, which brings me back to my question from a few years ago: were all these post-apocalyptic stories just a pretext for illustrating how the world is going to shit? I don't know, but just for the record, I've enjoyed the TV show and I've seen some things of value in it, to the detriment of others that sorely lack it.
First of all, since I've previously established that the main character of this universe, the flesh-eating zombie, cannot possibly exist due to the simple fact that entropy itself does not allow it, we can on this basis establish that TWD is in fact a fantasy story, much like Harap Alb or The Lord of The Rings or what have you. And just like those, TWD defines a great obstacle, something that our hero is tasked with attempting to overcome and often failing but sometimes succeeding, and that something is this thing with many names: the "walker", the "rotter", "sicko" or "roamer", the "creeper", "biter", "lamebrain" or "stinker". At its core, a supernatural being that thrives upon consuming life itself, except that it does this actively rather than passively. Our heroes are faced with a powerful force that seems to never exhaust itself, moreso that it feeds upon death itself.
So then, the main antagonist of the show is never Shane, nor is it the Governor, nor Negan, nor the Whisperers, nor the Reapers, the Commonwealth or other so-called anti-heroes that this show have to give us. No, these are just other folks aiming to survive the (post-)apocalypse through their own means, it's only that their means may be different than our heroes'. They serve only as examples, because surely, our heroes will learn from these new means they find and later on they employ them themselves for survival. The main antagonist remains the unending horde of walkers, a device of evil which may be even used for survival sometimes, but which eventually does what it always seems to do: it turns everything to dust and bones. Take for example one of the scenes in the earlier seasons, when Rick and his gang stumble upon a church: there the walkers surrealistically turn and look at the gang, immediately followed by an attack which leaves our heroes wonder whether there's a God out there anymore. This is one point where TWD diverges from the typical fantasy story: in this universe, Sauron may be defeated temporarily, but he will inevitably come back -- the struggle is constant, but then you die; and if your brain is left intact, you yourself will succumb to this force of evil.
Another point that makes our fantasy story special is that our heroes aren't really "the good guys", even though in certain moments the authors go to great lengths to portray them as such. For example, observe that wherever Rick and the gang show up, things tend to go south. Yes, arguably things might have gone south anyway regardless of who (if anyone) showed up, but I couldn't escape the feeling that Rick actively had a hand in all these situations; not because he's Rick and not necessarily because he wanted for things to take a turn for the worse, but because had he opposed this, he would have died -- in other words, because human nature doesn't change; nobody is actually a hero, especially not when there aren't any options left.
Conversely, Negan, who is, I believe, the best-written character in the entire show, isn't such a bad guy himself. He creates a power structure that is clearly bigger and more organized than Rick's, he has a mechanism for extracting competent people out of the multitudes -- which is what he tries all along the way with Carl: to grow his successor -- and he's good at spotting bullshit; except, well, when he isn't. The stability of Negan's power structure is predicated upon the strength of his web of trust, and for some reason or another most people near him seem to hate his guts. So this seems to tell us that Negan's power structure cannot survive the times, although at the end of the day, the authors seem to want to tell us that no power structure whatsoever can survive.
Which brings me to the long list of things that I didn't particularly enjoy about the show. First off, I don't like the "perpetual crisis" trope that's pushed all along -- it makes sense at the beginning, but as folks adapt, you'd think they'd develop a system to deal with zombies, even as the "smart" ones start appearing. The fact that S11E17 was aired a short while after the craze with that goddamned virus has to make you think: wasn't the sort of thing portrayed in this episode precisely the same kind of thing that your authorities did back in the day when you sat scared shitless that the virus is going to come at you? If so, then how come Putin saved you from the virus when staying indoors wouldn't? But anyway, this was just an example of state-sponsored propaganda, the list of censorship committee-approved gargle is long, from the fruitless effort of "rebuilding democracy" to the pantsuit cultural fetish of "keeping our enemy alive, so that he sees how the world oughta be", all the way to the inane yapping about the guy who died to "bring people together" -- sure, the individual does sometimes sacrifice itself for the good of the group, but this act of sacrifice is not arbitrary, more likely when the survival of the group is predicated upon the sacrifice. So in this sense, Shane's sacrifice of some dude to save Carl is at least as meaningful as Rick's self-sacrifice to save the group, even though the two are portrayed in two entirely opposite frames of judgment.
That aside, the character development is superb in the first three or four seasons. Although by then the threads become so intertwined that I suppose that the producers had to hire a larger team of writers to keep the thing together, which counterproductively enough, led to a worse product. By the ninth season, the story is full of plot holes and some of the characters are introduced and then swept away as mere devices, without any rhyme or reason. Take for example Judith Grimes, who is introduced as a super-girl who bosses everyone around, only to be forgotten and then brought back again repeatedly at various points, when the writers needed her to advance the plot. At some point, this inconsistency in action with respect to the viewer's expectation gives off the vibe that the characters no longer represent actual persons, but mere pawns to be used -- yes, I get it that Daryl of the eleventh season isn't the same as Daryl of the sixth season, but other than his consistently being a badass, his behavioural inconsistencies make no sense whatsoever in the context of his evolution.
So I was kind of right in my earlier assessment that the show kinda dragged on more than it was supposed to. I suspect that when the show started to diverge from the original sufficiently enough -- just like that Game of Thrones thing, say -- the producers took the liberty of keeping or killing of characters based just on how popular they were, using the (by now) standard people meters embedded in TVs. So then the TV version still used elements from the original, but the characters became interchangeable pieces in the story.
Nevertheless, I've really enjoyed reviewing TWD. By the way, this show has six (six!) spin-offs. On one hand this shows how damn successful it was, while on the other, I suppose that all this comes an illustration of the pitfalls of so-called success: as soon as your artifact becomes a pop-item, it inevitably devolves into nothing in particular, and the viewers are dragged along only by some unseen inertia that keeps the whole thing running. Though I guess by now eleven seasons looks like a decent mark to end a show; I mean, The Young and the Restless held on for fifty fuckin' seasons!
Oh well.