For intense TV show dramas that revolve around surviving, you can already expect a few deaths within the show. You might even be comforted by the fact that showrunners rarely kill off main characters. For "The Walking Dead," however, that's not the case, and it may have cost the show more than it expected.
Andrew Lincoln Said the Show Overddid It
If you ask a fan of the post-apocalyptic series which character's death was painful for them, you'll get a lot of answers like Carl, Lizzie, and Hershel, but you can expect that the majority would tell you it was Glenn's brutal murder.
It was such a huge event in the series that a lot of the fans were shocked about how the episode unfolded. Yes, it was already shown in the comics how Glenn died, but not everyone knew the source material and they didn't expect showrunners to go through with it.
To put into context how significant Glenn's departure was, even a newspaper in Arkansaw published an obituary for the fictional character, as reported by Gizmodo. Even the actor for Rick, Andrew Lincoln, said that the show may have crossed a line with Glenn's death.
He said it was the point that the show "over-egged the omelette." Even actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who played Glenn's killer Negan, expressed that the filming for the scene was intense, even asking Lincoln if that was normal.
What makes it more infuriating for fans is that a few episodes earlier, the show also put Glenn in a situation where he was surely going to die. It was then revealed that he survived, which brought a sigh of relief to fans only for it to be taken away so violently.
This caused a lot of hate and grief for the show, so much so that a lot of people stopped watching "The Walking Dead" the moment they killed off Glenn. That was made more apparent by a post on X where a user asked what point viewers gave up on the show.
With over 41,000 reposts and 205,000 likes, most of the responses said that they stopped watching the moment Glenn was killed off. One even said that although it was true to the source material, it was "ugly and unnecessary."
Carl's Death Didn't Help Matters
The show quickly grows darker as the characters realize what they have to do to survive, and even Rick's kid, Carl, becomes somewhat desensitized to killing along the way. However, he has since matured and is starting to become a more interesting character.
Viewers were starting to see his potential and what kind of story the showrunners might have for him, only to be surprised by the fact that they were killing him off as well. What's worse is that after everything Rick did to keep his child alive, his death was also very underwhelming.
Like my side characters in the show, Carl was simply bitten and had to end his life so he wouldn't become a Walker. That has also been a point where certain viewers decided to stop watching the show as it went on.
