Oh, sorry, didn’t see you there. You just caught me writing a script for AMC’s mega-franchise The Walking Dead, which finally finished in 2022 after 177 episodes and has now splintered into a number of spin-off shows which are basically just the same. I’ve got the most obvious thing in there early (a scene where someone desperately tugs on another character’s arm and goes: “Please, we have to go!” while a mass of zombies get closer and closer to pushing the door down), so just need to pad out the other 55 minutes.
What else? Oh, of course: I need someone to get bitten by a zombie and slowly transform into a zombie but the person who has to kill them is also their brother or sister or wife, so they dilly-dally and either they do kill them in the end but become a shell of a person afterwards – or they mess about so long that they also get bitten by a zombie and die. Got to have an adult having an unbearable conversation with a child, obviously. A scene where a man gets a rifle out of the flatbed of a truck and goes: “No, you stay here – it’s safer,” before messing up their mission in a way where a second person could have been really helpful. A rumour about another city actually being safe, someone’s lost their husband and can’t find them, and the group taking refuge in a building you wouldn’t expect them to take refuge in. Right, that’s 60 pages. AMC, I’ll send you an invoice.
I do think there’s an argument to be made that The Walking Dead and its resulting spin-offs – Daryl Dixon starts this week (Friday, 10.30pm, Sky Max), and there’s also Dead City and The Ones Who Live, with a fourth in development – is one of the strangest franchises going. It’s huge – hundreds of episodes, games, comics, Funko Pops – but unless you slogged through those 11 original series, it doesn’t really have any cultural longtail. This is the danger of a show that relies on the draw of beloved characters (or, in some cases, just the actors who play them) so can’t really kill anyone, even though the main jeopardy of a zombie apocalypse world is, well, whether zombies are going to bite you to bits.
Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes somehow survived nine series and a bridge explosion and now he’s still alive in The Ones Who Live, constantly on the hunt for a beloved person because he keeps losing them. Norman Reedus’s Dixon is similarly cursed with endless survival: Daryl Dixon starts with him floating to France on a bit of scrap metal, before spending six episodes being clunked on the back of the head and waking up with his hands tied behind his back before, oop!, he’s escaped and also all the bad guys are dead, the end.
Thankfully, I suppose, we don’t have to deal with any dialogue reflecting on that, because Daryl Dixon rarely if ever says anything at all. He slumps his way around the desolate French countryside and comes upon a convent and says next to nothing. A militia leader addresses him in perfect English and he barely grunts something back before getting hit on the head again. There’s a precocious young French boy constantly nattering at him and all Dixon does is hitch his rifle on his shoulder, walk very slowly towards another zombie horde set piece, maybe occasionally says “be quiet” but that’s about it.
As always, he’s on a quest to find someone or something, but keeps getting drawn into complications because, dammit, he’s the only hero in this town who can do anything about it, and, dammit, he’s grown to care for Clémence Poésy despite swearing he never would. They come upon an abandoned-looking building. This could be perfect, right? This could solve all their problems! Oh no, not again: a rival faction has already taken it over and they have a menacing vibe so, despite there being zombies in the woods nearby, they are going to leave this place at nightfall and hope only one anonymous member of their group gets torn to shreds by the hordes.
There are so many fun or weird or beautiful or interesting stories you could feasibly tell in an apocalyptic landscape – as The Last of Us episode three showed us last year – but Daryl Dixon is basically six hours of watching Reedus walk somewhere while having sub-First Dates level “Do you have any siblings?” conversations with a series of French strangers. Still, I’m sure there will be dozens more episodes of this extended Walking Dead universe made before the planet explodes. I hope whoever they are for is enjoying them.