Fear The Walking Dead’s Cast Is Abandoning The Show In Record Numbers

The cast of Fear The Walking Dead is shrinking, with characters both new and old dying off each week in Season 7. It’s pretty much the only thing I like about this dreadful season. Frankly, there’s not a single character left on this show that deserves to survive.

Keith Carradine (John Dorie Sr) is out. Omad Abtahi (Howard) is out. Both met their end in this past Sunday’s truly awful episode, “Sonny Boy.” Neither death made much sense for either character, but here we are.

Alex Nisenson’s Charlie is dying from radiation poisoning and won’t last to the end of the season. Radiation poisoning is a neat little narrative cheat tool the showrunners and writers can use whenever they want, as randomly and selectively as they please.

It’s looking like Kim Dickens (Madison Clark) will return just in time for Alycia Debnam-Carey (Alicia) to bow out. She’s been cast in a lead role on the Hulu Original Saint X which is filming at the same time as Fear’s 8th season (no, somehow it still hasn’t been cancelled!) according to Dustin Rowles over at Pajiba. Rowles has noticed this “exodus” of Fear cast members as well, and speculates that more are about to leave.

It seems very likely that Ruben Blades (Daniel) will also leave the show this season as his character is suffering from increasingly bad dementia. It’s entirely possible he’ll take Strand with him, though Colman Domingo remains one of the biggest champions of Fear. Still, I’m not sure how Strand—now a child murderer and thrower-of-people-off-rooftops—can come back from all this. It seems the only way to move forward is if he dies.

Maggie Grace’s Al left the show earlier this season and Peter Jacobson’s Rabbi Jacob Kessner mysteriously vanished into the ether (maybe he’s hanging out with Dog from The Walking Dead somewhere).

That leaves us with Morgan and Grace, the truckers, June, the criminally ignored Luciana (Danay Garcia has been given the shortest of short shrift for many seasons now) and Madison, returned from the dead to find the show she once starred in deader than dead.

Oh, and Dwight and Sherry, our favorite power couple. There are many ways one could describe both these characters and their crackling relationship dynamic. Sherry reminds me a lot of Amber Heard, actually. Give Dwight some drugs and booze. He already has a copious, crippling amount of codependency stripping him of anything remotely like manliness, may as well give him some crippling addictions as well and just have the two of them scream and throw bottles at each other. What a fun toxic relationship they have! Better still, they get their own episode this coming Sunday!

“The series has run into a creative dead end (it’s a lousy show now), so it makes sense that some of the more dynamic actors, like Domingo and Debnam-Carey, might exit,” notes Rowles. “Despite the exodus, the series is still anchored to Lennie James’ Morgan, who came over from The Walking Dead in the fourth season. At some point this season, he’ll be joined by Kim Dickens’ Madison, who was “killed off” in season four but will somehow return, as well.

“Dickens will be forced to carry the series, along with Lennie James and a dwindling number of spare parts, as it heads into its eighth season, where shooting will move from Texas to Georgia. That might explain, in part, the sudden turnover, or it might be that a number of actors are simply ready to move on. With production moving from Austin to Savannah — and presumably out of the nuclear winter the series wrote itself into — the cast members may have seen a good opening. The question, however, is whether the showrunners — who oversaw three up-and-down seasons before they drove Fear into the ground — will make the transition, too.”

That’s the big question. It seems obvious that whether or not AMC finally wises up and gets new creative leadership onboard, we’re losing a pretty big chunk of the cast. I know a lot of OG fans are excited about Madison’s return, but I just can’t muster that excitement. If she’s written as poorly as they’ve written every other character on this show, will she even be Madison anymore?

And I mean, honestly, she wasn’t what made the show work in the first place. It was the dynamic between her and her kids and Strand and Daniel that made this show work, and most of these characters (it appears) will be gone soon. The Morgan and Madison show is not something I can imagine really succeeding in any meaningful way, even with new showrunners.

Maybe Season 8 will be the final season and AMC can finally put this monstrosity out of its misery. All these actors, and especially long-timers like Colman Domingo and Alycia Debnam-Carey, deserve better. And so do we, dear readers. So do we.