Unlike pretty much everything else, science fiction and fantasy had a great 2016. There were so many great shows that we had a lot of contenders for our best list, and only a few for our worst, so we ended up with twice as many TV series to acclaim as disparage.
When AMC’s Walking Dead spinoff Fear the Walking Dead debuted last year, it tried to distinguish itself with a very simple premise.
So now “The Walking Dead” is just messing with us. The show wrapped up its sixth season on Sunday by welcoming arguably its most eagerly anticipated character from the comics: Negan, the sinister leader of the Saviors. He did not disappoint.
In a newly unsealed deposition given in his big profits lawsuit against AMC, ousted The Walking Dead creator Frank Darabont holds nothing back, blasting executives at the cable network for hiding in air-conditioned offices, explaining how he had to manage a crisis at the beginning of the second seas
While watching “Four Walls And A Roof,” I found myself thinking of Hannibal—and not for the most obvious reason. (The most obvious reason being “people getting eaten.
The last time I was emotionally invested in The Walking Dead, Negan, a straight-up terrorist, had just arrived, waving a barbed bat like a four-four. The show has since completely lost me.
So now we know: Jeffrey Dean Morgan should make a terrific Negan. In his first extended action on “The Walking Dead,” Mr.
Note: This article is also included in our year-end creative wisdom round-up. Chris Hardwick is a punchline. Not in a negative way, though. The comedian and author simply hosts so many TV shows that a popular joke of late involves wondering if there are any shows left that he doesn't host.
Resolving a season-spanning cliffhanger and ending a full year of speculation, The Walking Dead revealed in last night’s Season 7 premiere, “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be,” exactly whose head it was that Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s villain, Negan, crushed with a barbed wire–wrapped
1. You can buy Daryl’s crossbow at Walmart for $300. 2. HBO execs passed on The Walking Dead because they thought it was too violent. 3. Norman Reedus (Daryl) originally auditioned for the part of Merle. 4. The actress who plays Tara is the real-life sister of Francis from Malcom in the Middle.
I know, it’s a bold proclamation, especially after the non-events of the first half of season seven.
In what might be this week’s worst new idea, Reuters reports that AMC is working on an ad-free subscription video service that would be exclusively available to cable TV customers.
All images: AMC.It made Rosita a compelling character. I’m not actually trying to be shitty here, at least not to the character herself. It was The Walking Dead’s responsibility to make us care about Rosita, something it’s resolutely failed to do since introducing her back in season four.
Way back in the second week of season six, I praised the way The Walking Dead was increasingly using its cold opens — the short bits of the episode that happen before the opening credits and are meant to entice us to keep watching — to tell stories in a more artful and intriguing fashion.
Hey, it’s Beth! Remember Beth? Last we saw of her, she was riding off in a car with a white cross painted on the rear windshield. Daryl tried to follow, couldn’t keep up, and then everybody sort of forgot about her for a while, because that was narratively convenient.
So it turns out he’s not dead. By “he,” I mean the Wolf I assumed Morgan killed back in “JSS,” and by “not dead,” I mean, well, you know.
This weekend, The Walking Dead will lurch back to life and try to atone for the torturous eight episodes that formed the first half of the AMC show’s seventh season.
That’s what Rick Grimes says after King Ezekiel, a man who has a pet tiger, argues that going to war with Negan’s Saviors would be too devastating. So many have already sacrificed their lives fighting back hordes of zombies, Ezekiel explains.
Last year, AMC’s The Walking Dead betrayed its audience by throwing away beloved characters and coherent storytelling, all in the name of Negan.
All images: AMC. In last night’s episode, Rick and Michonne reminded us that they are elite zombie-killing machines, while managing to get constantly screwed over by the capriciousness of reality. Also, there was a hilariously fake CG deer. Somehow, this all pretty well sums the episode.
Did Negan finally get what’s coming to him? Discuss the Walking Dead finale here. Image Gene Page/AMCThe seventh season of The Walking Dead just ended and, well, we figured you may want to chat about it.
So those weren’t his guts after all. A few minutes into Sunday’s episode of “The Walking Dead” we learned, as many suspected, that actually wasn’t Glenn being consumed a few weeks ago. It was Nicholas, doing in death what he could never manage in life, which was to take one for the team.
The first time I played the “Walking Dead” video game, I killed an elderly man. It seemed like the right thing to do. I had stepped into the shoes of Lee, a black man from Georgia trying to survive the zombie apocalypse.
But Darabont was fired during production on season 2, so Kirkman moved to L.A. and joined the writers’ room. He handled the transition well, according to executive producer Gale Anne Hurd. “A lot of people come in thinking they’re going to reinvent the process,” she says.
All images: AMC. The world of The Walking Dead is full of dangers. There are zombies, of course, who desperately want to eat your flesh. There are bad humans like the Saviors and the Wolves, who kill the living with even more relish than the undead.
gLast year, AMC’s The Walking Dead sparked an outrage. The gory season 7 premiere threw away beloved characters in the name of archvillain Negan, and audiences followed suit: by the time the midseason finale rolled around, ratings had dropped 40 percent.
Hulu’s highly-anticipated live TV service is now available in beta and from my viewing experience, it’s the strongest offering yet, thanks to its combination of live TV, Hulu originals, and an on-demand selection of thousands of movies and TV shows.
So, last week I posited that The Walking Dead might have gotten good again. After watching last night’s episode, I would like to amend that. The Walking Dead is no longer bad or boring, it’s still a definite improvement over the first half of the season. But now, it’s, uh… insane?
We pick off where we left off last week: with Rick and his crew surrounded by dozens of dour, black-clad unknowns. Now, though, we finally get a good look at this mysterious new group. They may be dirty, but they’re armed—and not to be underestimated.
Well that was fast. Rather than stretch out Gareth and the other Terminus survivors as recurring threats lurking in the shadows, “Strangers” follows the premiere’s lead, diving right in with irrevocable results.
On last night’s penultimate episode of season seven, our heroes completed their final step in trying to stop the bad guys who are forcing them to give up their stuff… by attacking another community and forcing them to give up their stuff. Yeah.
In what future historians will refer to as “the post-Governor era of The Walking Dead,” the show has stepped in to fill the gap left by the conclusion of Breaking Bad.
Melissa McBride is so damn good. Case in point: in “The Well,” she spends most of her time pretending to be cheerful and friendly to keep herself protected from a new group of survivors.
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow... "Fear the Walking Dead" improved on itself slightly this week with "The Dog," in which all parties Clark and Manawa reunited and regrouped in order to finally start a caravan out of LA. This being the show that it is though, they never made it.
This is the third piece in a three-part series on sleep. Read part one, on falling asleep, and part two, on sleeping and dreaming.
Last year, AMC’s The Walking Dead sparked an outrage. The gory season 7 premiere left beloved characters behind in favor of archvillain Negan, and audiences followed suit: by the time the midseason finale rolled around, ratings had dropped 40 percent.
Last year, AMC’s The Walking Dead betrayed its audience by throwing away beloved characters and coherent storytelling, all in the name of Negan.
The Walking Dead, AMC's — pardon the pun — monster-hit zombie drama, found its fifth and best season sharply divided between its two most prominent storytelling styles.
Last year, AMC’s The Walking Dead sparked an outrage. The gory season 7 premiere threw away beloved characters in the name of archvillain Negan, and audiences followed suit: by the time the midseason finale rolled around, ratings had dropped 40 percent.
This post contains spoilers for The Walking Dead Season 7 premiere.
By Matt Fowler It's time to leave the day to day turmoil of Rick, Daryl, Michonne, Glenn and the rest of the East Coast zompocalypse survivors for now and head back in time, and out to So Cal, for an undead outbreak origin tale - as AMC seeks to turn Robert Kirkman's Walking Dead phenomenon into a
The pre-release chatter from the Fear The Walking Dead producers was eager—almost worried-sounding—to distance the spin-off from its birth mother and namesake, The Walking Dead.
This is starting to feel like the Star Trek season of The Walking Dead. Each week, our heroes visit some new colony (or planet, in Trek terms) with some clear defining trait.
Sunday’s Season 7 finale was telegraphed and flawed, but seeing the good guys triumph, even in contrived fashion, is preferable to watching the needless torture that had begun to sink the showThis post contains spoilers from the Season 7 finale of The Walking Dead.
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You’d think by now that I’d be used to The Walking Dead’s decompressed storytelling, but realizing this week that Rick’s plan to deal with the rock quarry herd is going to be the main storyline for the first half of the season (if not beyond) took me by surprise.
Carol is The Walking Dead’s best character. Michonne is a wonder, Morgan continues to fascinate; Daryl’s laconic uber-competence has deservedly made him a fan favorite; Dr.
After I watched last week's episode, I resolved that, barring some kind of creative miracle, the finale would be the last time I bothered watching The Walking Dead, as the frequent lows had finally made me unwilling to wait for the occasional highs.
The Walking Dead is always at its best when it focuses on two things: its core relationships and cool zombie shit. So even though very little happened in the most recent episode, “New Best Friends,” what did happen was satisfying in a way the show hasn’t been in a while.
I was tempted to joke about this being Hershel’s farm redux after my first viewing of “Sicut Cervus.” But I don’t think that the Angelenos will stay at the Abigail compound nearly as long as Rick & Co.
I understand why people are often frustrated by The Walking Dead’s pace. It’s slow.
In “After,” Michonne decided that the reason to keep living was to be with the people you cared about, but it could be even simpler than that: maybe the reason to keep living is just finding a reason to keep living.
Last week, Walking Dead executive producer Gale Anne Hurd acknowledged that the negative response to the extremely graphic show’s seventh season premiere caused them to tone down on the violence for the following episodes. This week, two other executive producers deny that happened.
But it also offered us something we needed: some answers.
Tara, like most Alexandrians these days, has a lot on her mind. Between the constant stress of the Saviors and their unwelcome visits and the sinking fear that only she knows where Rick could find the guns Jadis needs, it’s not an easy position.
The sun has long since set by the time the cars and RVs ramble back into Alexandria to find a somber Rosita at the gate. She says nothing about Sasha’s whereabouts, but instead tells Rick, Michonne, Tara and the rest that they have company.
The recent season premiere of “The Walking Dead” marked the start of the seventh year we, the audience, willingly watch the most inept group of survivors imaginable, as they attempt to navigate a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated by flesh-eating walkers and the worst human scum.
When star Lauren Cohen talked to EW about filming the season six Walking Dead finale, she said that “it took a really, really long time for everybody to feel okay again.
The Governor is still a total a-hole. AMC And he beat the tar out of poor Milton for disobeying him. Guess a Governor’s gotta do, what a Gov’s gotta do… Oh, and he also beat Andrea and tied her to a chair.
It’s safe to say that Maggie hasn’t wasted any time at the Hilltop.
This story is an absolute home run so far. Over the course of the year and early into the next, Image Comics is releasing a 48-page story telling the rise (or fall) of The Walking Dead's biggest villain: Negan.
Rick is about to have a bad day. All Images: AMCThis was the episode. The one we’d be waiting for. After a season of being under the evil thumb of Negan, Rick and the gang were finally ready to wage all out war on The Walking Dead’s greatest villain. Revenge was imminent. Or, so we thought.
After a brief and gunplay-filled introduction to Terminus and its Stepford-like, and otherwise creepy, inhabitants, The Walking Dead Season 4 concluded with a cliffhanger.
Robert Kirkman, No. 1 on The Hollywood Reporter's most powerful comics writers list, has one major regret about AMC's adaptation of his long-running The Walking Dead — and it's a big one.
In “Bury Me Here,” The Walking Dead did something it’s been threatening to do ever since its very first season: It destroyed the remaining pacifism of its sole hold-out conscientious objector, Morgan.
Remember when The Walking Dead's seventh season began last October with Glenn getting his head crushed beneath Negan's spiked baseball bat – one of the most devastating and polarizing deaths in the entire run of this corpse-strewn series? We've come full circle, in a way: Last night's fi
I have a confession to make: when it comes to scenes of characters looting through the remnants of a once thriving society, the magic is gone.
That might seem like a lofty claim, but I don't know that it actually is. Whatever its strengths, The Walking Dead has rarely been a series that breaks down readily into episodes.
We came into The Walking Dead’s season 7 finale on the brink of war. Rick was collecting both artillery and an army, while Negan was preparing counter-measures that appeared to include two former Alexandrians: Eugene and Sasha. Suffice it to say, we are no longer merely on the brink.
My problem, I think, is I keep expecting The Walking Dead to have a consistent narrative philosophy. I don’t mean in some kind of high-minded, “what does this all really have to say about America?” kind of way.
A few months ago (our time), Rick had a plan. He knew there was a quarry full of zombies near Alexandria, and he thought it would be a good idea to divert the herd from town. Sort of an advance strike to forestall catastrophe.
After a first half that began with a stunner and ended on a snooze, the back eight of season seven kicks off with a welcome end to the wussification of The Walking Dead.
Betrayal was in the air during The Walking Dead season-seven finale. Scarface Dwight comes to Rick to let them know he is done with Negan, and that he has a plan to defeat him.
Remember Rick Grimes’ final line at the end of season 4 of after he and his pals had just been locked in a train car at Terminus and seemed all but done for? “They’re screwing with the wrong people,” he confidently told the others with nary a speck of fear nor hesitation in his voice.
As expected, the inevitable showdown with the Saviors arrived. Every week for the sixth season of AMC’s post-apocalyptic drama The Walking Dead, Lenika Cruz and David Sims will discuss the latest threat—human, zombie, or otherwise—to the show’s increasingly hardened band of survivors.
The Walking Dead’s seventh season has often felt like an endless slog through a zombie-infested quagmire, where even the zombies are too stuck to do much more than moan. If there’s been a theme for this season, it’s arguably been ambivalence and indecision.