But it is also looking to rebound from a stretch that alienated many fans with storytelling shenanigans — most notably a cliffhanger that made viewers wait for months to learn the identities of Negan’s victims in the Season 6 finale — and a string of grim, disjointed episodes in Season 7. Last year’s ratings were the lowest since Season 3.
And that was before an off-season in which Mr. Kirkman and several other executive producers sued AMC, charging it with shortchanging them on profits from the show. The complaint follows a similar suit by the other co-creator, Frank Darabont, who was fired during production on Season 2.
So the question going into Season 8 is, are the hiccups simply understandable ebbs within a long-running serial, or the beginning of an aging show’s decline?
The producers and AMC insist that however things look from the outside, everyone involved remains committed to the health of their golden goose. The creators predictably say the next phase of the story is the most exciting yet, and they expect “The Walking Dead” to last another 100 episodes or more.
“We want to keep doing it at least as long as Robert keeps doing it,” Scott M. Gimple, the showrunner, said. “We’re prepared for the long haul.”
Since debuting on Halloween 2010 as a horror curiosity, “The Walking Dead” has become a pop culture institution — earlier this month the series donated a collection of props and costumes to the Smithsonian.
But there’s still plenty of story left to tell. (The events of Season 8 begin in Issue 115 of the comic book; Issue 173 comes out in November.) Charlie Collier, the president of AMC networks, points to recent raucous cast appearances at Comic-Cons and traffic to the Season 8 trailer, which has more than seven million views, as evidence that, for all their kvetching last season, fans remain as engaged as ever.
Another thing in the show’s favor is that it is returning to its roots, creatively, with this season’s “All Out War” arc. A coalition led by the show’s hero Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) will face off against Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and his gang, the Saviors. After testing viewers’ patience by separating fan favorites like Rick, Carol (Melissa McBride) and Daryl (Norman Reedus), the new phase reunites the core group against a colorful villain, a dynamic that animated popular stretches like the Governor and Terminus story lines. And unlike the overhyped arrival of Negan in Season 6, the “All Out War” story line will be resolved within a single season.
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“Hopefully the people who said they’d never watch the show again” will come back, Mr. Morgan said. “There are going to be some big payoffs.”
Cast members say viewer criticism of last season was not unexpected. Mr. Gimple warned the show’s stars that the brutal murders of the popular characters Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) and especially Glenn (Steven Yeun) at the hands of Negan would be controversial, said Danai Gurira, who plays the katana-wielding warrior Michonne.
While the fan outrage and dipping ratings received plenty of coverage, that didn’t translate into more pressure during shooting for the new season. “It was not felt on the set at all,” Ms. Gurira said. (The production did, however, endure a tragedy: John Bernecker, a stuntman on the show, died after an accident on the set in July. The premiere episode honors him in the credits.)
Viewing numbers for “The Walking Dead” peaked in Season 5, with an average of 13.3 million viewers in the key 18-49 demographic advertisers covet tuning in each week (20.1 million total), according to Nielsen. By Season 7, that had fallen to 10.3 million in the demo, a decline of roughly 23 percent in the key cohort. (Over all the show drew an average of 16.4 million total viewers, or roughly 18 percent fewer than in Season 5.)
Though “The Walking Dead” still nearly doubled its closest competitors last season among viewers aged 18-49, media analysts, some of whom downgraded AMC Networks stock in response to last season’s “The Walking Dead” numbers, will be watching Season 8 closely for signs of further slippage, said Michael Nathanson of the research firm MoffettNathanson.
“They really have to come out of the gate strong,” said Mr. Nathanson, whose company downgraded AMC in December. (For the record, the stock is up about 7 percent since then.) “Ratings still matter — it’s a driver of ad revenues.”
Mr. Collier, the AMC president, said the falloff in traditional viewing had been offset by increases online. But digital revenue streams are generally not as lucrative as conventional TV ads.
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He’s similarly sanguine, at least publicly, about the hiatus’s other big story: The litigation begun by Mr. Kirkman, Gale Ann Hurd and other series producers, which claims that AMC has denied them what could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars by manipulating the show’s reported profits. In a statement, AMC called the suit “baseless and predictably opportunistic,” but both sides have pledged to continue working together to keep “The Walking Dead” and its ancillary properties as successful as possible.
“This is a drama that has continued to reinvent itself and remain relevant, and I think that can happen for a long, long time,” Mr. Collier said.
How long exactly? The smart bet is some version of “as long as it wants to,” and possibly longer.
AMC now thinks of “The Walking Dead” as “not just a show, but really as an incredible piece of content that we engage fans with not just for the 16-week season, but for the remainder of the year,” Mr. Collier said.
Besides “Fear the Walking Dead” — which will have a crossover subplot with the original show, Mr. Kirkman announced at New York Comic-Con — there are the highly rated postshow “Talking Dead,” video games and conventions. AMC just created a fan rewards program that will award points for interacting with the “Walking Dead” universe — watching episodes, posting on social media, creating fan fiction — and will soon debut a quarterly merchandise box subscription, a sort of Trunk Club for “Dead” heads.
As for the show itself, it has officially been renewed only for Season 8. But there are signs that the writers are looking far beyond the current time frame. A moment in the trailer seemed to depict Rick as a much older man, though no one involved will elaborate on whether the scene was a time-shift, a dream sequence or some other storytelling device.
All things considered, the only things that might eventually slow the march of the “The Walking Dead” are the human physiques of the grueling show’s increasingly middle-aged stars.
“I still have a little bendiness left in my body, but it does get harder,” Mr. Lincoln, 44, said with a laugh. “There comes a point, when you’re rolling around in the dirt covered in zombie blood with a fellow middle-aged man, that you think, is there any dignity left in this?”
“I’m excited about this season — we get to get the band back together,” he added, more seriously. “I’m hoping the audience is going to feel the same way.”
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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/arts/television/the-walking-dead-season-season-8.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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