![]() So when the sixth season finale, “Last Day on Earth” aired and promos contained the scene with the whole group on their hands and knees in front of Negan and his barbed wire bat, fans knew that someone’s time had most definitely come. Anyone who had read the comic was well aware that this scene was already infamous-the unexpected death of Glenn at the hands of Negan in the comics is one of the most gut-wrenching and unflinchingly brutal losses in The Walking Dead. Part of the reason, of course, was expectation due to how closely the scene, in which one member of the group is beaten to death by alpha douche Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), looked to be adapted straight from the comic books. The dumpster, though, ultimately paled in comparison with Glenn’s actual denouement, which was among the most cynical ratings grabs in cable history. Whether or not you were a reader of Robert Kirkman’s comics (I was), it came off as a prime example of greedy and exploitative TV storytelling. It was a bait and switch of epic proportions, and it still stings now, four years later. Rather, I was completely disenchanted by the transparent ratings grubbery with which AMC delivered that death. Hell, it killed its core characters off all the time, usually in the same episode it gave you a good reason to care about them. Or in other words: I was by no means upset that this show killed poor Glenn. If I’m looking back to the moment that the show truly lost me, though? The moment when I knew there was probably no coming back, and when the purpose for my viewing shifted to “obligation” rather than pulpy enjoyment? It was the much ballyhooed death of the beloved Glen Rhee, the heart and soul of the Grimes Gang, who shuffled off this mortal coil in the Season 7 premiere, “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be.” Airing in late October of 2016, it was the payoff to an astoundingly sleazy tease of “which character will die?” that left fans of the series on the hook 7 months earlier, all in pursuit of a shameless ratings bump. In fact, my favorite Walking Dead-related item of the last two years turned out to be some branded TWD whiskey, rather than anything I saw on my TV screen. For a long time, I was among that dwindling group holding out and continuing to watch the series out of a certain sense of devotion, and I kept up weekly reviews for Paste in 2019 well past the point of those reviews feeling at all relevant. The ratings are a fraction of what they once were-still pretty damn high for cable-but a huge percentage of the audience has moved on, leaving a skeleton crew of die hards to piece together the nonsense still unfolding on the neverending zombie story as the Grimes Gang (Judith Grimes, now) struggles to overcome yet another villainous group in the form of The Whisperers. The Walking Dead at its peak was a phenomenon-the last big cable “water cooler” show before all the buzz moved to Netflix and beyond.Īnd yeah, the show still exists today, whether or not you’re aware of it. It’s a level of cable engagement that was unprecedented, and one we’ll almost certainly never see again, given the dominance of streaming services and on-demand viewing rather than scheduled programming. In fact, it may feel like that period of time never happened at all, but we assure you that it did-between 20, in fact, almost every single episode of The Walking Dead was watched by more than 10 million simultaneous live viewers in the U.S.A. That makes me very, very happy.It may be asking a lot of you, the reader, if we prompt you to think back to a time when AMC’s The Walking Dead was one of the hottest shows on television. ![]() One of my favorite things that I always see is when I see kids that are not Asian dress up as Glenn for Halloween. You get to watch people completely cling on to a character that has similarities to them in every single way except for their face, and that is beautiful and wonderful and I’m very proud of that. And it got to a point where most people didn’t even acknowledge the fact that he might be ethnically different than them. We went into so many households around the world, and people got to see what it’s like to be an Asian-American person, and they got to see an Asian-American person completely normalized as they are. None of that mattered, it just mattered who he was as an individual. “He didn’t have to answer to why he was so Asian, or why he did that or this based on his being Asian. ![]() “I’ve had the privilege and great honor to play a character like this that didn’t have to answer to anything other than his own character,” he said. What makes the character of Glenn so special in Yeun’s eyes is that his ethnicity was not his sole defining trait. ![]()
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