However, from the beginning, the biggest question that loomed over it was "OK, Norman offs his mother as a young adult, but he's 17 now. How do we kill time?" And the show, pounding its chest, yelled "SMALL-TOWN DRUG AND PROSTITUTION SUBPLOTS." It's hard to comprehend misjudging your audience so badly that you make the opening episodes of your Psycho prequel about Norman Bates discovering pot plants in his neighborhood. It's like being unable to enjoy Star Wars because you're too busy wondering where Obi-Wan gets his groceries.

Five seasons isn't that bad, but this is the kind of stuff that happens when you're not exactly sure how you're supposed to fill your time. It happens with The Walking Dead every season. I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I say that The Walking Dead is probably going to outlast us all. Whole societies will crumble and fall, and the only thing to remain untouched by time will be "PREVIOUSLY ON THE WALKING DEAD ..." This means that The Walking Dead has way more time than it knows what to do with. In any other show, important storylines would be handled promptly, because they worry about money and time and viewership. But The Walking Dead swaggers around like a college kid that doesn't care about when he gets to class. "Why rush, motherfuckers? We're already getting a Season 12."

AMC
"Extended gardening montage? Why not? We're on the air until 2025."

Characters repeatedly go through the same revelations they went through a few episodes before. Every character has learned that they "have to be tough in this new world" multiple times a year, but every other episode includes at least one moment when someone just can't pull the trigger. The zombie virus has left them in a Groundhog Day state of repeating their emotional breakthroughs. It's why they have to kill off people all the time -- if they didn't, someone would eventually come up to Rick Grimes and tell him that this speech is nice and all, but we heard it yesterday.

And oh, it is. Over the course of a long, laborious season, Negan is basically reduced to a cursing Scooby-Doo villain, almost getting away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids. American Horror Story, an anthology show that does a new plot in every season, fills its narrative with villains that it only planned a few solid episodes' worth of anything for. After a few scary introductory scenes, they mostly float around like ice cubes in a punch bowl of haphazard storytelling.

The villains in Penny Dreadful, aka Frankenstein vs. Dracula vs. My Feelings, were a little more capable than the ones seen in most horror shows, but also a little more lazy. As it turns out, there's a very fine line between "This villain is a slow, methodical mastermind" and "This villain is going to wait around until the heroes literally knock on his goddamn door," and Penny Dreadful tripped headfirst over it, convulsing in the middle until the season was over.

Showtime
Hi. I'm Dracula, the lord of all evil. And it'll be eight-and-a-half episodes before I do literally anything.

Daryl Dixon would be a great character in a movie like The Thing because he's at his best when he's good for something. When you force him to be a leader, which he's very uncomfortable being, it's unshowered redneck magic. But because The Walking Dead can't always have him as the lead, there are a lot of moments when he's just waiting around. And since he's one of the most likable characters on modern television, you can't kill him off easily for fear of some kind of backlash. A great horror character, but a really mediocre TV character.

The same thing happened with Glenn. People were furious when he got brained, but what had that dude done for about the last two years? Yeah, he's nice and he doesn't want his wife to get eaten, but why keep him around? "Glenn looks generally concerned for an entire season" isn't exactly a treat for an actor.

AMC
"Remember when I was the comic relief? God, we were optimistic back then."

It's irrational to expect every cast member to have a substantial part in every scene of a multi-season TV show. But one of the reasons horror shows get criticized for being less scary over time is that as they raise the stakes for the grand scheme of things, the lack of any function has lowered the stakes for the characters. Even useless characters are fine in a horror film, because they'll be gone in about ten minutes. But I'm not going to get teary over someone's TV death scene because they were in the background a lot, no matter how tender the accompanying music is.

... but if someone gets shot or bitten or suddenly werewolf'd "outta nowhere," and you latch onto that as your primary way of getting rid of side characters, then pretty soon, those side characters go from being potentially meaningful parts of the story to "outta nowhere" fodder. Penny Dreadful had a few main characters and a bunch of death scene prequels.

I hate to rag on The Walking Dead so much, because deep down, there are aspects of the show that I really enjoy. Usually those parts involve crossbows and arms getting torn off, and luckily, The Walking Dead is fully stocked with them. And I know that real-life deaths are frequently sudden, despite the fact that we all dream about giving a 30-minute address about the state of good and evil to a room full of everyone we've ever loved before we kick it. But while someone suddenly getting hit in the face by a bullet was a great "OH s**t" moment in Season 3, doing it four years later and expecting our oh-shittedness to remain at full capacity is only tedious.

AMC
Five dudes. Combined amount of time taken to kill each of them off: about four seconds.

I'd honestly give more of them a pass if they were jump scares, as jump scares done right are thrilling. But "outta nowhere" deaths lack the framing and build-up of a jump scare. You get no jolt out of it. It's just hasty dying, and the vast number of these in a relatively short amount of time has made it impossible to connect with any characters. And why would you want to? They're just going to be in the middle of a sentence, get bitten, and then never mentioned again. It's like asking someone to enjoy a sandwich, but as soon as they get a taste of it, you pull it out of their hands and then insult them for trying to enjoy a sandwich. The Walking Dead is a bunch of stolen sandwiches. Five stolen sandwiches out of ten.

And while we never got a scene where Jessica Lange obliterated a hallway of mutants, American Horror Story had something similar, only with weirdness. About halfway through each American Horror Story season, the self-awareness full-body tackles the plot, leaving it unsure about whether it's a horror series featuring comedy, or a comedy series featuring insufferable plot twists. When Tales From The Crypt ended, it was no longer a f*****g madhouse of irony and gore; it was an anthology about not-very-nice people doing not-very-nice things to other people that were secretly not very nice. And The X-Files became about David Duchovny's boyish grin.

20th Century Fox
The Twist: It was always about his boyish grin.

Even shows like Attack On Titan aren't immune to this process. The first few episodes of Attack are mostly concerned with giant naked people and their attempts to eat regular-sized clothed people. Maybe I'm a very specific demographic, but it's going to take way more than an hour to get me used to the sight of a tremendous baby man chomping down on screaming innocents. No matter how many times I see it, my reaction is still "Ah. This is odd."

Funimation
"This is really becoming quite the interesting Wednesday."

But Attack On Titan slowly delved more into epic throwdowns than the intense panic of "THAT LARGE DUDE IS EATING ME. I CAN SEE HIS HUGE ASS." And while I'm always down for monster punches, I do miss the worldwide phenomenon of a bunch of people gathering around Netflix to watch the dietary habits of the big and shirtless. I miss it every day.

Funimation
Nostalgia.

Daniel has a blog and a Twitter.

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