You see you'd have room to insult anyone who thinks AMC has big influence over it if it wasn't for the fact that The Walking Dead's entire problems from season 2 onward stem thoroughly and completely from AMC's fuckery behind the scenes.Originally Posted by blackholesun
Acclaimed filmmaker Frank Darabont of The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption fame is Executive Producer and showrunner of season 1 of The Walking Dead, and it's a massive fucking smash. It's a surprising success for this relatively low-budget horror series about rednecks from Atlanta trying to not to die and fucking each other's wives, based on a comic book that anyone besides comic fans didn't know existed. It wasn't Spider-Man. It wasn't even Preacher-level well-known.
And so season 2 comes along. And Frank's proven he can make a good product, and Frank's proven that it can be popular.
Unlike Mad Men or Breaking Bad, the two prestige series that have been netting AMC Emmy's consistently and annually season after season after season, AMC owns the rights to TWD completely. They do not have to go between another company. The showrunner cannot threaten to walk and take it to another network, like Matthew Weiner of Mad Men can (and who did, using his ability to walk as regular leverage for budget increases and control over the marketing).
So AMC goes, "Great, this guy made a success out of something that we didn't really know what way it would go, now let's do it for even less."
They cut the budget, and now Frank's struggling to make things work. They take the tax return they were supposed to get for production costs and leave them without it on short notice. You have people filming in deep South heat in the middle of the summer, bug bites and sunstroke all day long, and no executives ever spend time on set. It's utter bullshit, and Frank knows it. And fuckery happens, and things go wrong, and next thing you know Frank Darabont is no longer the visionary behind this show. Any cast members who threaten to speak out about their bullshit are threatened with deaths and Dale actually dies because he refuses to keep working without Frank at the helm.
It was a clusterfuck of a season and Darabont went on to sue AMC and win. He actually won in a lawsuit against the network. And that was season 2.
Since then, they've fired another showrunner and swiftly installed another. There's been constant rumor and issue surrounding actors and pay and unfair treatment. They've consistently lowered budgets despite the highest ratings of any cable TV show and a massive merchandising extravaganza. The show has had constant pacing issues, constant "just wait till next episode!" clickbait-esque cliffhangers and midseason finales and constantly cheap writing for years and years across three showrunners.
You can blame a lot on them, sure, but it's a consistent pattern no matter who is at the helm. At a certain point it stops making sense to blame it only on the lead writer when not a single one can make things work, despite one of them being Frank Darabont of all people (who, by the way, had wanted to do a spin-off centering on the fall of Atlanta and the soldiers from the tank Rick hides in in episode 1, only for it to be deemed "too expensive," yet years later they decide "Time for a spin-off series about the fall of civilization!").
They even had a hashtag ready the moment the finale finished and everyone involved has been giving stocked, rehearsed and canned answers to questions about it, with various actors saying differing things on whether they know about who died or not. Jeffrey Dean Morgan openly said he had zero clue they weren't going to show it until it aired. It's very, very clear that this was almost certainly not the decision that had been originally made and it was a late change to stretch it out for the sake of hype and ratings. This is a show keeping its viewers in a perpetual state of blueballs, always teasing and never delivering, always building and never exploding.
It is a show where the midseason finale's last shots got outright retconned in the midseason premiere and almost everyone just fucking went with it. It's got problems deep at its core and is just not good. It won't ever be good. It has a strong cast, it has a strong well of source material to draw from, it has had talented people involved in the writing and yet it continues to never actually be a consistently good show. At all. Ever. Not one season besides the first has been able to be consistently decent at any point, and even the first had some real bullshit with the whole CDC plotline. It is incapable of being good and it never will be in any lasting sense of the word, and after so many changing of hands, it hits a point where it can't only be the fault of the writers/showrunners.
This is the only major show AMC has had that they have thoroughly outright had complete control over and it is in turn the only one that has been such a fucking bore of a trainwreck. They didn't have complete say over BrBa, and it was a masterpiece. They didn't have it for Mad Men, and it was a masterpiece. AMC was lucky to have two shows early in their foray into original programming that they didn't actually have full ownership over and were led by absolutely visionary and amazing showrunners that remained at the helm and ended it on their own terms all the way through. So people thought, "Oh, AMC is the HBO of cable! AMC is fucking golden! They're the best!"
But they're not. They got lucky by being able to present someone else's work in front of the class and now that those kids have graduated, they're left scrambling for their own posterboard, and it's utter shit. Their only good original show is Better Call Saul, by the same team as BrBa which they also do not have full ownership over. AMC is absolutely a part of the problem and well worth being included in the discussion of why the most watched cable drama is a regular hot mess of shit and I and anybody else who brings it up is not a dumbass for saying it, we're simply looking at it for what it is.
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