It's the end of an era in many ways, as The Walking Dead is coming to its conclusion after an 11-season run. Based on the comic book series written by Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead first premiered on TV screens on AMC in 2010. The show has seen its ups and downs over the course of its run, and while it's long ago lost the viewership that it once had at its peak, The Walking Dead remains one of TV's most popular shows. A dedicated fan based has stuck with the show through thick and thin and hopes to see things pay off in a big way with the final episode.
Series showrunner Angela Kang has teased that the finale is going to wind up upsetting some of these fans. She warned that one episode doesn't really give the creative team enough time to let every one of the major characters get the attention that they truly deserve before the fans say farewell. Inevitably, this means that some fans will be disappointed to see their favorites without much to do. But as Kang told Entertainment Weekly, what was important was telling the best story possible with this final show.
"What I'll say is that this is the approach that we took, and it's possible that not everybody's going to be satisfied with this, but when you do have that many characters, you cannot give every person equal weight in something that is basically, I don't know, 60 minutes of screen time. You're just gonna have a nothing burger story. It's not going to be every single person gets equal screen time, because like I said, it just makes it impossible to wrangle."
The Walking Dead Will End, But the Franchise Lives On
The good news for fans of The Walking Dead is that the series finale is really just closing one chapter of an overall story that will continue to be told. In some ways, many loose ends will be tied, but the characters will be moving on to more adventures in the zombie apocalypse. That includes Norman Reedus' Daryl Dixon, who was originally announced to appear in a spinoff alongside Melissa McBride's Carol Peletier. McBride has since departed the project, leading to the spinoff moving forward as a solo Daryl Dixon show.
Other spinoffs are also moving forward. Another spinoff dubbed Isle of the Dead will follow Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). That's separate from the anthology series Tales of the Walking Dead that will keep highlighting standalone stories from different parts of the world. Fear the Walking Dead also has an eighth season in the works.
The Walking Dead finale airs on Sunday night on AMC and AMC+.