The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – One of the strangest TV franchises refuses to die

The danger of a zombie series certainly lies in whether or not the characters are bitten to death, but the stars somehow manage to survive indefinitely. Will the spin-offs ever stop?

Oh, sorry, I didn’t see you there. You just caught me writing a script for AMC’s mega-franchise The Walking Dead, which ultimately ended in 2022 after 177 episodes and has now split into a number of spinoff shows that are basically the same. I have the most obvious thing in there at the beginning (a scene where someone desperately tugs on another character’s arm and says, “Please, we have to go!” while a mass of zombies gets closer and closer to push the door down), so it’s just a matter of buying time for the remaining 55 minutes.

What else? Oh sure: I need someone to get bitten by a zombie and slowly turn into a zombie, but the person who has to kill him is also his brother, sister, or wife, so he procrastinates and either kills him in the end but then turns into a shadow of a person, or he procrastinates so long that he also gets bitten by a zombie and dies. Obviously, an adult has to have an unbearable conversation with a child. A scene where a man pulls a rifle out of the bed of a truck and says, “No, stay here, it’s safer,” before bungling his mission in a way that a second person could have been really useful. A rumor that another town is actually safe, someone has lost her husband and can’t find him, and the group takes refuge in a building you wouldn’t expect them to take refuge in. Okay, that’s 60 pages. AMC, I’ll send you a bill.