The Walking Dead Spinoff Announcements Are Killing The Final Season's Buzz

gamespot.com:

After 12 years and nearly 200 episodes, AMC will soon offer up its conclusion to The Walking Dead. The zombie drama premiered, fittingly, on Halloween 2010 to a horde of five million viewers. That number would grow up to three times as large over the next several years before losing steam over the back half of its 10+ seasons on TV. Amid arguably questionable calls in the writers room and an increasingly fragmented audience spread across countless streaming services, The Walking Dead has been bleeding viewers since Season 5, from a peak of 17 million down to just two million watching weekly in Season 11.

Nonetheless, the network has big plans for the story's world, going so far as to coin it The Walking Dead Universe (TWDU). But as viewers continue to jump ship in the show's final hours, it's oddly the biggest fans who are caught in the crosshairs of strange marketing decisions. The Walking Dead has a number of spinoffs on the way, and chances are fans plan to sample them all, even if they'd rather not know about them at this point.

Note: This article discusses potential spoilers for The Walking Dead. If you've not yet learned about the show's spinoffs, consider yourself warned.

One could argue that the four most important characters in The Walking Dead's post-Rick Grimes era are Daryl, Carol, Negan, and Maggie. Three of them have been around since the first two seasons, while Negan (Jeffery Dean Morgan)--a fan favorite--first popped up in Season 6. Morgan brings a level of prestige the show hasn't really introduced much since Darabont left. So why is it that with half of the final season yet to air, I and the two million other hangers-on already know that these four will survive whatever the series finale looks like?

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