Why Some Long-Time Fans Stopped Watching The Walking Dead

Even if you haven't watched a single episode to date, chances are you're at least aware of "The Walking Dead." The series has occupied a space on AMC since 2010, and in the years since, it has grown into nothing short of an entertainment juggernaut. It has spawned several spin-off shows and a handful of video games and will eventually jump to the movies, turning a quaint adaptation of Robert Kirkman's comic book series into a massive multimedia franchise. Of course, much of this growth will happen without the show that started it all at the forefront.

With the completion of Season 11, "The Walking Dead" will officially bid viewers farewell. Such news broke in September of 2020, explaining that the final batch of 24 episodes would conclude in mid-2022, formally ending a television era as we know it. Naturally, this revelation generated mixed emotions within the "TWD" fanbase, with some expressing their sadness at the program's end after dominating the small screen for years. On the other hand, many admitted that wrapping things up had to happen given the show's decline in popularity and narrative steam.

Compared to where it stood during its first few years on the air, "The Walking Dead" has significantly dropped in viewership. Here's when and why so many longtime fans decided to change the channel along the way.

It goes without saying that the "Walking Dead" fandom isn't a monolith, and it includes folks with different ideas, perspectives, preferences, and more. Therefore, there's no one single moment that made people let the show go all at once. Rather, multiple different factors resulted in some people giving up on it as others in the community continued to watch, as evidenced by a Reddit conversation where user atrocw admitted they dropped "TWD" from their watchlist part of the way through.

"Right after Glenn's death. Turned it off then," wrote liamemsa, referring to the brutal demise of Gleen Rhee (Steven Yeun) that kicked off Season 7. Faithless195 stopped watching around a similar timeframe, specifically mentioning that the Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) cliffhanger to conclude Season 6 sucked the excitement right out of his arrival. On the other hand, Ricochet888 feels the show became a "Soap Opera with zombies," so they turned it off and -andiclare- called it quits sometime post-Terminus.

At the end of the day, "The Walking Dead" still has its fans, and it'll undoubtedly go down as one of the most popular titles to ever grace the small screen. Simultaneously, for some, it'll live in infamy for how it left them so disappointed that they stopped watching entirely.