Is The Walking Dead's Ambitious Future Spoiling The Final Season Experience?

The Walking Dead announced another spinoff series on Monday, revealing Isle of the Dead will follow Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) beyond their days on The Walking Dead for a new journey in Manhattan. It'll be a six episode debut season, matching the episode count of The Walking Dead's freshman year back in 2010. This joins Tales of the Walking Dead and a series which will follow Daryl & Carol as spinoffs which to succeed The Walking Dead's final season. Many are excited to hear the news of the franchise's continuation but there is also merited frustration brewing.

The future for The Walking Dead franchise is not going to be what it once was: a TV show which nabbed 17 million live viewers on more than one occasion. This is in part because AMC+ subscribers get new episodes early which steals some live viewership but also audience simply is not as large through eleven seasons and some questionable creative choices along the mostly successful way. The future still may be quite bright and it's definitely ambitious.

One exciting new detail can revamp the franchise. It came in the post-credits scene of The Walking Dead: World Beyond, possibly as a means to combat the fatigue which has set in for Dead fans over the years as zombies have been far less threatening. It's become human versus human conflict with zombies as a mild, tension-building backdrop. Now, it seems there are going to be much faster, more intense walkers. Should we call them "runners?" A scene presumably set in France saw a variant version of the undead which attacks much more aggressively, something which could take The Walking Dead back to one of its most exciting eras which saw characters learning how to adapt to not only the people in this post-apocalyptic world but the post-apocalyptic world in itself. 

This new variant detail would factor well into The Walking Dead's feature film promised to be on the way, where Andrew Lincoln is expected to reprise his role as Rick Grimes. Since the announcement of a movie trilogy following Lincoln's final TWD episode in 2018, there has been very little shared on that front other than they're "still alive". A Walking Dead movie with zombies that are now threatening like those in World War Z or 28 Days Later, giving the heroes a reason to fear them? Now, that's an idea to fire up a fresh new endeavor right there.

With this exciting and very marketable revelation and the continuously impressive cast list for Tales, the future of the franchise has an exciting pivot on the horizon for those willing to stay onboard and newcomers alike. This all follows a recent pivot which saw Angela Kang takeover the main series, serving as showrunner following a couple of seasons which drove viewers away just before the series was also set to lose Lincoln, Cohan, and Danai Gurira. Kang managed to craft some of the best stories for the show in years and Cohan ultimately returned just less than two seasons later.

Still, The Walking Dead fans find themselves frustrated as AMC seems to step forward and then take themselves half of a step back. First of all, The Walking Dead's final season should have the highest stakes built into it which could result in an exhilarating last run where fans can speculate, predict, hope, grieve, and experience it all together. Instead, the franchise built on a mantra of "no one is safe," has essentially marked four of its biggest characters as, "safe." Not only do people now watch at different times but they also now know Daryl, Carol, Maggie, and Negan all have to survive to go on in their spinoff shows.

The Daryl and Carol show was announced in conjunction with Season 11 of The Walking Dead being revealed as the final season. Just like that, the final 24 episodes had two characters who weren't going to feel threatened from the audience's perspective, no matter how many guns were pointed at them or walkers surrounded them. It was a similar feeling of whiplash which fans felt when Lincoln left the series and, before fans could finish wiping their tears away from the brilliant episode, AMC announced a trilogy of films starring Lincoln as Rick Grimes. Four years later, it seems like Lincoln returning for the series finale is more likely than any movie. Though the movie is still promised, there was merely minutes where fans could speculate about where, when, and if they would ever see Rick again. 

Now comes the news of Negan and Maggie in Isle of the Dead. Set for a 2023 debut, the series will have to start shooting before The Walking Dead releases its final episode in the winter of 2022. The Greg Nicotero-directed series finale will wrap up production on the series as a whole this month. That said, the idea of allowing Morgan and Cohan to have been spotted on a zombie-filled New York City set might have been more beneficial? Look at the Marvel Studios method. Before Avengers: Endgame hit theaters, the studio had Black Widow in production with several more titles in pre-production (like Eternals, WandaVision, and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier) and said nothing. Marvel Studios doesn't comment on rumors, set photos, leaks, or anything of the sort. This all fues the conversations online and allowed Endgame's stakes to pop through the roof – and become the biggest movie of all-time.

Preserving spoilers is something The Walking Dead is familiar with, looking back at how they kept Michael Cudlitz on set throughout Season 7 to preserve the spoiler of his Abraham Ford character being killed in the Season 7 premiere. It resulted in one of the biggest television events in history. In their defense, there may have been a lesson learned from pretending to have Glenn killed by zombies and removing Steven Yeun's name from the opening credits. The creative risk backfired in Season 6 when viewers felt like The Walking Dead was trying to trick or outsmart them. The backlash not reflect in the viewership numbers, as they continued to climb to a peak in the Season 7 premiere. 

It's impossible to know what to expect from the announced spinoffs at this point, other than each of their pairs of cast members. Isle of the Dead sounds quite exciting, given its Manhattan setting. Apocalyptic cityscapes often become iconic, like the early Dead scenes in Atlanta or visuals like New York City in I Am Legend. Negan and Maggie's pairing for a series would have been a shock a few years ago when Negan slaughtered Maggie's husband Glenn before her eyes but circumstances in more recent episodes have forced the two to work together and understand one another. Still, Maggie's most recently broadcasted actions prompted Negan to head out of town. Now, we know they will eventually come back together, alive. 

The Daryl and Carol show makes sense, given the two characters having a long-running history and bond but comment sections will also let you know that a portion of the audience have been loving seeing Daryl open up to Lauren Ridloff's Connie, as well. Neither relationship has officially crossed a line to solidify a romantic connection, though fans have been able to find shades of romance in both dynamics over the years. It's resulted in those fans being vocally divided about it on social media with this spinoff driving them further apart. Daryl's one confirmed love interest on the show, Leah, was left wounded in the Season 11B premiere and it's unclear if she will return. Romantically or not, Daryl will almost certainly be riding off into The Walking Dead's sunset with Carol to an unknown location when the series finale comes along.

The Walking Dead seems to be making every creative effort to keep the quality on track (excusing the lackluster Season 10 bonus episodes which were filmed in the early days of the global pandemic) but the franchise has some fans rightfully scratching their heads. No doubt, it is a tough time to navigate production secrets as iPhones and social media often tell all. But is this a case of over-promising and under-delivering, as the yet unfulfilled movie trilogy announcement looms years later? If social media discussions and media coverage of episodes must wait a full week from the episodes being released on AMC+ in favor of aligning with linear broadcasts, should the new show announcements which will follow the series finale have a similar standard? Or is the high-quality content which Kang is delivering (and Fear's Ian Goldberg and Andrew Chambliss have found several years into their run) enough without any of the extra fanfare or efforts to preserve every last spoiler-y bit?

Season 11 of The Walking Dead may culminate in a story which gets the entirety of the audience to be interested in Daryl and Carol's next adventure and pairing for a spinoff. It may convince those reluctant viewers that Maggie and Negan can work together in New York or maybe have a territory war for the city. Both shows might prove to be great ideas by the time the main series wraps up. However, in being announced early, the spinoff shows are being judged by the audience now, with their first strikes being the spoilers that come with them. 

Share your thoughts in the comment section or send them my way on Instagram! The Walking Dead is currently airing new episodes of its final season at 9pm ET on AMC.