Yahoo News 7 lessons Game of Thrones could teach The Walking Dead
We love Game of Thrones like it was family. And despite ourselves, we still love The Walking Dead the same way, even though it's more like a step-brother who used to be fun to hang out with but has made some questionable life choices and is now in need of an intervention.
TWD might get more viewers – it's the No.1-rated show on US TV – but even its most ardent fan would have to admit it's gone off the boil in recent years, while GoT has gone from strength to strength, learning from its mistakes. (And there have been plenty – we're not blind to its faults.)
Well, Walking Dead, allow us to intervene. Here are seven things that you need to learn from Thrones.
1. Sort out your pace
Like a rotting walker, TWD lurches along for four or five episodes at a time, barely moving a finger all the while, then pounces, then stops moving entirely.
We ended season 6 – and began season 7 – with Negan pounding Glenn and Abraham's skulls into the mud, a controversial but effective episode that signalled his psychological conquest of the Alexandria gang. It would have made sense, then, for the two halves of season 7 to be Part One: the fallout and Part Two: the fightback.
Instead, we had to wait through sixteen episodes of Negan grinding our heroes' faces into the dust before Rick and his buddies took the battle to Negan. And even then it was just the opening salvo!
Thrones, on the other hand, once it was freed from the constraints of George RR Martin's source material in season 6, immediately hit the gas. Sansa and Jon reunited. They defeated Ramsay. Arya returned to Westeros. Daenerys invaded. Every episode, it felt, changed the layout of the chessboard in a major way.
The Walking Dead? You could cut out the entirety of season 7 and not miss a single important development. Where are we now that we weren't in episode one of Season 7? We've acquired Oceanside and the trash people. Big whoop.
Oh okay, Ezekiel and Shiva. We'll grant you them.
TWD really doesn't have any excuse here: the source comic has tons of unused potential storylines beyond the Negan arc, and the cast won't hang around forever – so why not pick up the pace?
And on that note – why the reluctance to intercut between storylines? TWD often goes for weeks without checking in on, say, Daryl, Carol or Ezekiel, yet the pace of the show would benefit enormously from switching back and forth between characters and plots. Like Thrones does every single week.
We're not here to lecture professional screenwriters on storytelling (psst: that's exactly what we're doing – tee hee!) but how hard is it to stagger events so that they interweave?
Instead we get an entire episode seen from Tara's point of view at Oceanside.
2. Bring the laffs
Let's get back to those sixteen episodes of face-grinding. It was gruelling enough sitting through the relentless misery of that season – would it have killed them to vary the tone now and again?
(Yes, you're right, if they'd tried, we'd probably be complaining about how wildly the tone varied, but showrunners have to take fans' inconsistency on the chin. Them's the breaks.)
Game Of Thrones can deftly switch between hilarity over the name "Dickon" and a harrowing scene of bloody carnage without the gears grinding. Why can't TWD?
3. Listen to the fans
We don't just mean pay attention to ranty Digital Spy articles – though everyone should, obviously – we mean take note of what's working and do more of it. Do less of the stuff that isn't.
If a minor character proves unexpectedly popular, give them something else to do. If a subplot provokes only anger, drop it like Rachel and Joey dropped each other.
Thrones' Dorne storyline wasn't popular – so Dorne got written out pronto. You may have noticed Game of Thrones fans championing the absent Gendry. And look who came back in 'Eastwatch'.
But who likes Enid? Who likes Dwight? Who likes Eric? Who can even remember who Eric is?
(This is Eric)
The Walking Dead ranks against Thrones for the sheer number of featured characters – which is an achievement considering the latter covers two continents and TWD is set in a corner of the deep South. But where everyone on Thrones has a specific function in the greater story, half of the TWD cast could drop dead (or undead) of measles, and we would barely blink.
4. Plan your endgame
To be fair, the TWD comicbooks were always written to be open-ended. Creator Robert Kirkman may have had a secret finale planned all along, but they've always played as an episodic, soap-opera-like rolling story with distinct arcs within it.
But the show isn't. Actors are only contracted for a number of seasons, and eventually – usually before season Ten – they get too expensive to keep hold of. Andrew Lincoln isn't going to stick around for three more seasons. Norman Reedus is surely raring to get started on something new. Chandler Riggs wants to go to college.
While it's entirely possible to keep a show going with a new cast, at least build in a climactic resolution to the first phase. Thrones will end in just over a season's time. No messing. Showrunners DB Weiss and David Benioff know what's going to happen, and how much time it has to happen in. The ending's already been written.
As any Lost viewer knows, an uncertain end date only leads to endless padding, meandering storylines and viewer dissatisfaction.
5. Stop putting the cart before the horse
The Walking Dead has some very cool special-effects set pieces. You can tell they've spent months planning some of those zombie effects.
But that's a problem. Executive producer and zombie-effects maestro Greg Nicotero is undeniably one of the greatest practical-effects wizards in the industry. But he has as much clout on the show as showrunner Scott Gimple and comics creator Robert Kirkman, and you sometimes get the impression that he comes up with a cool idea for a set piece, only for the writers to then have to retroactively justify it within the story.
Why were all those zombies hidden under piles of sand on the bridge on Heath and Tara's mission? The segment looked cool, but it would have looked cooler if it had made a lick of narrative sense. Why would the hungry undead lie still under the sand for years before emerging at the exact moment Heath walked past?
The result is big, expensive practical-effects scenes interspersed with hurried, cheap CGI composites being used to paper over the cracks in the story. If they'd saved a few quid on the narratively pointless spike-zombie gladiator scene, for example…
…then we might have been spared the notorious deer and cut-and-paste trash-pile.
Game of Thrones, meanwhile, gives us epic moments like this, and crucially, they're in service of the story:
6. You know, spend some money
Yeah, we get that HBO has bottomless pockets and Thrones costs something like $6-10m per episode. But guess what? The Walking Dead is the most popular show on TV! Throw in commercial sponsorship and worldwide syndication and you're looking at buckets full of cash that are being hoovered up by AMC and spent on something else.
Because they're not spending it on the show – if they were, we'd see a lot more experienced directors and writers on the team instead of the journeymen we've got, and absolutely no shoddy-CGI wildlife.
7. Release the potty-mouthed tide of filth
You're not allowed to swear on network TV. Advertisers seem to think that viewers are offended by it, and that they will associate the rude words with their unblemished, sacred brands. Associating them with skull-crushing, eyeball-popping violence is fine, but heaven forbid our ears are besmirched with curse words harder than "dang".
Game of Thrones gives this nonsense the lie. It knows how to deploy a C-bomb: like when the venerable septuagenarian Lady Olenna Tyrell (Dame Diana Rigg) casually told Jaime that his son, Prince Joffrey, "really was a c**t, wasn't he?"
It was a sublime moment combining shock, comedy and character observation, a brilliant way for a vulnerable old woman to hurt Jaime even in defeat. (You might have an argument that Bronn and The Hound swear more gratuitously, but come on – if you met them in real life, they would, wouldn't they?)
Meanwhile, we're expected to believe that the cast of The Walking Dead respond to the cock-a-doody apocalypse with only a goshdarned holy heck or two? Come off it.
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