Rick Grimes Or No, Do We Need Five ‘Walking Dead’ Shows At Once?

This weekend, there was a major revelation for Walking Dead fans. Not only was Rick Grimes returning to the series, he was doing so in a way that would be scrapping his planned movies with AMC, as they were instead just giving him a new spin-off series with Michonne, something I suggested they do instead of the movies a while back, as that idea never really seemed great in the first place.

As excited as I am to see the return of both Rick and Michonne, I am starting to question AMC’s overall plan here. Currently, we exist in an era where there’s The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead, and we had a spin-off that lasted for two seasons and just 20 episodes, The Walking Dead World Beyond.

We are now about to head into a period of time where even though the main Walking Dead series is over, there will be five Walking Dead shows airing at the same time. I mean, not all will be on top of each other, but all should air over the course of the year. This new show brings us to a wild grand total of:

• The Rick and Michonne spin-off
• The Daryl-minus-Carol European spin-off
• Isle of the Dead, the Negan and Maggie spin-off
• Fear the Walking Dead, heading into its eighth season
• Tales of the Walking Dead, an anthology series of standalone episodes AMC has said they want to farm potential new spin-offs from, if certain concepts pan out.

Why do I think this is a potentially big risk, other than just potential pure TWD overload? A few reasons.

Essentially everything you see here is no longer going to be referencing the comics as source material. While the main show added and subtracted from it, it was following the overall comics arc, and now all of that is gone. Everything here will need to be invented from scratch, and I’d argue that many times when The Walking Dead has done that before (post-season 3 Fear, World Beyond) that has not gone terribly well.

Past that, you are really relying on the idea that all these characters can support their own shows without being a part of a larger ensemble. Rick and Michonne? Sure. Daryl? I am…less sure. And if you’re having almost every lead of the show appear in spin-offs, I guess I wonder why the main show is ending in the first place, as you’re losing a lot of other fan favorite characters who wont have a place to fit anymore.

Fear the Walking Dead…that show is its own category of “what are they doing here?” as I just cannot believe that A) it’s been on this long and continues to be renewed with little pushback, and B) it’s kept its same showrunners who have taken the show in some deeply bad directions for years now. Every season of Fear it feels like has to be its last, but it just keeps coming back.

It feels like AMC is trying to build up an “MCU of zombies” here by not scaling back The Walking Dead after eleven years but somehow dramatically expanding it, even though it very much seems like we’re past the prime of the series. That said, the show still does well for the channel, and they are still doing lucrative deals with places like Netflix that air new seasons once they’re wrapped.

Will I watch these shows? Sure, I will, but man, that is a whole lot of Walking Dead.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.