Revisiting The Walking Dead

Circumstances aligned recently to allow me to catch up on The Walking Dead. I started with spinoffs: Dead City and Daryl Dixon. I had already watched most of Fear The Walking Dead and the first season of World Beyond. Fear was better about not lingering. World Beyond was too much teen drama, but I don't think it was meant for me.

The spinoffs aren't bad. Season 11 of the original series was okay. I just can't seem to find the interest to keep going on the earlier seasons I missed without that lost community aspect we had on social media back then. Maybe it's not really about The Walking Dead; maybe it's about the communal feeling that seems increasingly hard to access in our modern world, and that made the pacing more bearable by giving us time and space to discuss things.

There's an alternative universe where someone with influence made The Walking Dead fix its pacing issues before the entire fandom vaporized. If you were one of the original fans of the show, you remember it dominating Twitter with every episode. For a while. Having all these spinoffs exploring the world of The Walking Dead would have been the jackpot for me back then.

Anyway. At least give it a watch. I dropped out at the Whispers. Some people dropped out all the way back at the farm, or the prison. Try the spinoffs as soon as it stops being fun to watch. I find it's best not to linger on things you don't enjoy. That's how you become that person who bursts into every conversation about the thing to complain, even if the conversation was positive about the thing.