How the walking dead got death wrong
It's unfair to compare the comic and the TV because a) Kirkman's written the whole book and b) he can do (and has done) virtually anything he wants, including swearing, nudity and extreme violence. So you've got very different mediums with very different limitations on conveying information and then inconsistent stewardship within the TV medium. I know Kirkman's involved but he's not in charge. Also the audience for the show is vastly larger than for the book, so outrages aren't really comparable either.
Remember what Michonne did to the Governor in the book? And then what the Governor did to Tyreese outside the prison fence? And how both were depicted/altered on the show? It wasn't even Tyreese and it certainly wasn't treated with the same slow brutality. Glenn's death in the comics was graphic and shocking but comic books can only control still images and space. There's no sound design, there's no imposition of time, the reader can spend as much time looking at the damage as they want. On TV, the creators are telling you "you need to look at this and hear this, for this amount of time." Don't get me started on how much Snyder got visually similar but essentially wrong in Watchmen :)
A big part too is how the show teased the deaths as a cliffhanger. The books didn't withhold Negan's actions over a huge break of time. So at no point was the audience having to deal with simultaneously dreading the reveal and wanting to see it for personal closure. People had a hard time reconciling the fact they couldn't wait to watch someone they cared about get beaten to death with a baseball bat. Even I thought it was a shitty way of getting people to tune in and I didn't care.
I believe part of the frustration with WD comes from the inconsistency in showrunners. All that money going to Matthew Weiner in Season 2 didn't help either. You've got three different visions all trying to tell a compelling story about compromised people in horrific situations. When a new person (possibly with a Hollywood-sized ego) comes onto a hit show, you're going to have some inconsistencies in characterization, tone and pacing; either by accident or for distinction from "what the other guy did."
A good chunk of the strength of many popular shows (Breaking Bad, The Wire, Game of Thrones, Sons of Anarchy, Banshee, Spartacus) comes from having the same people at the top making the decisions throughout. Cuz they know what show they're making and ultimately what they want to say. All of the above shows (except for The Wire), I would argue fit on the spectrum of pulp exploitation. So being shocking, stylish and spectacular was baked into their respective premises. The Wire was shocking because it revealed the reality of how terrible the system is set up to be for a huge part of urban America.
There’s a Vox article that asserts how WD seemed, to a lot of viewers, to be about the modern assault on morality: should we compromise what we've always believed in because the world has become more cruel and unforgiving (cough Batman cough). Yes with graphic zombie violence but The Point was an examination of the human condition through the experiences of people the audience could relate to, not just how much CGI blood they could fit into each episode. The article mentions that Negan's actions were motivated by Rick's crew killing a bunch of Saviors while they slept. I don't know the context for the murders but that seems like the show's morality struggle is over and now it's just a show about people dying/killing in increasingly horrible ways. That kind of show has just as much right to exist as the next but it doesn't sound like it's the one most folks signed up for. I'm getting Lost deja vu...
And season 7 will be merely about what Rick is going to do to Negan. Or maybe it'll be Caaaaaaaaarl. But as even GoT did, once Ramsay got his comeuppance, I wonder if Walking Dead, amidst the "righteous" torture inflicted on Negan, will question it when they've gone too far.
One last thing before I stop ranting about a show I don't watch (but is huge in the zeitgeist): This feels once again to fit into my theory that post-9/11, Hollywood (capital H) is no longer confident that the mass public will accept stories where the protagonist prevents a massive disaster (relatively speaking). These days the disaster happens and the protag gets revenge (sometimes preventing a larger disaster but it's not crucial). It feels like a backwards pop cultural justification for America not stopping Al-Qaeda but nailing Bin Laden eventually. The hero goal posts are getting moved to places decidedly unheroic for me.
But we'll see.
