Gene Page/AMC
I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but Negan is a bad, bad man. In 2016, The Walking Dead aired eight episodes of people talking about how bad Negan is, followed by eight episodes of Jeffrey Dean Morgan sneering, monologuing and peacocking to illustrate how bad Negan is. Along the way, Negan became so bad he became boring, or else the endless conversations and displays of his badness became so overblown that I became desensitized.
The Walking Dead has now killed off too many characters whose names I remember and done too flimsy a job of introducing new characters, with exhaustingly long periods separating characters and diluting the connections between them. Something needs to be done to reinvigorate the Walking Dead zombies and, more importantly, to reinvigorate the show’s pacing. The latter process could be started by AMC telling producers, “Get back to doing regular-length episodes, not every story requires 90 minutes,” something AMC will never tell the producers of TV’s highest-rated show. — D.F.