#show development

This is very true and very evident, in my experience. Lately, there’s been stronger engagement with fan made Carol and Daryl content than there is with the official account’s attempts at engagement. Even beyond active fans, it feels like there’s a general audience ready and willing to reignite their enjoyment of the show that they remember enjoying way back when, but its fan made content that’s reaching them, not AMC.

Casual viewers have always responded favorably to Carol. That’s actually where you see the biggest dissonance between the creative decisions and audience expectations. It would be expected for a character that’s had a major arc like Carol’s—banishment through assault on Terminus—to emerge as one of the central characters of the narrative. Caryl’s joint emotional arc at the beginning of S5 leads to an expectation that there will be a payoff to that buildup by the end of the season. Instead, everything fizzles and we get increasingly erratic plotting with dropped storylines and story beats which don’t serve the characters. Shock value doesn’t build a lasting audience and there’s the decline in viewership in S6-8 because of the breach in trust between the writer and his audience.

A long running TV show needs to sort of ‘reinvent’ itself around season 5. It’s natural to see a fall in viewer numbers if there’s nothing new added, things mixed up to add excitement for what will happen next. In the case of TWD, Carol’s character development served that purpose, but then everything became muddled in an emotional arc that lacked any kind of emotional realism. You had to really reach to make any kind of sense out of “I can’t kill to protect those I love, so I will leave and pretend that they’re all alive.” It doesn’t fit with the character’s emotional takeaway from the Sophia arc or the grove arc.

The only reason Carol leaves Alexandria is because her inclusion would force the scene where the audience first meets Negan to play out entirely differently from what we got in the show. Even the reveal to Alexandria (in the Wolves arc) that Carol’s a formidable fighter feels hollow/shallow because there’s no one there to absorb the realization. Morgan already knew she was more than she pretended to be and the remaining Alexandrians never acknowledge it.

The general audience identifies with Carol because she rises to the occasion in the way viewers hope they themselves would, if they ended up living through a zombie apocalypse. She grapples with her morally gray decisions, with the demons from her past, with self-worth, with her bereavement in a very human way. It resonates to circumstances beyond her specific ones. The love she has for her extended found family and the sacrifices she makes to take care of them are qualities that are valued in our real life communities.

So, I’m always baffled by AMC’s poor decisions because this is the most basic concept of making a successful TV show. (That is, one that gets sustainable ratings across multiple seasons.) Josh Sapan, the then CEO of AMC, pitched the Caryl spinoff because he knew it would serve as the financial backbone to the franchise and the network. Its emotional core would draw a loyal fanbase and the premise of a road show would satisfy casual viewers with adventure, as well as the parts of the fandom that want an immersive world to be explored. The ‘lure of the West’ has always been an audience draw, from Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows in the 1880’s right through the mid-century Westerns of Henry Ford, to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and onward to HBO’s West World and the shows of Taylor Sheridan.

All a TWDU show really needs is a writer who’s faithful to the characters and can create an intriguing setting for them to explore. Someone who’ll breathe some life back into the tired lore and make that expansive enough to support the creation of more shows within the franchise. It’s really not difficult if you understand narrative structure and have halfway decent imagination. Carol and Daryl are both so rich to write for and Melissa and Norman’s otherworldly chemistry is a dream scenario for any production to have.