The Ones Who Live review: Please, let The Walking Dead franchise die already
The Walking Dead's latest spin-off clings to the allure of "Richonne," but has little to offer beyond that
TV Reviews The Walking Dead
A decade ago, The Walking Dead wasn’t a mere TV show, it was an impossible-to-escape cultural phenomenon. Crafted with precision, powerful performances, and prosthetics, early TWD rose above regular zombie fare upon its 2010 premiere—that pilot remains flawless even today. In its first few seasons, the AMC series transcended its genre, presenting a gripping post-apocalyptic survival tale by diving into terrifyingly real human emotions. It also successfully brought the comic book storylines and character dynamics to life with distinct twists. Regretfully, the show lost sight of those things as it dragged on.
Akin to the “walkers” at its core, TWD eventually became an unrecognizable, messy, empty husk. It lingered mercilessly until 2022 when it wrapped up after 11 seasons. That wasn’t nearly the end. The franchise continued with spin-offs ranging from understandable (Fear The Walking Dead) to eyebrow-raising (World’s Beyond) to drastic (Tales Of The Walking Dead). And it got worse. There were the egregious blunders of additional spin-offs for Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus), Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan), and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). A so-called series finale is purposeless if audiences don’t get time away from beloved original characters. (Give us a chance to miss you, TWD!)
The transparent, pointless gimmick expands further with the franchise’s latest six-parter, The Ones Who Live (TOWL), premiering on February 25. The show is a flailing last-ditch effort to breathe new life into a universe surviving on a ventilator. It’s extreme nostalgia bait because it focuses on Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), a.k.a. the man who started it all. TOWL catches up to Rick after he disappeared on a helicopter in early TWD season nine (back in 2018, for those keeping track). His wife, Michonne (a sensational Danai Gurira), split from the group in season 10 to hunt him down after discovering he was alive.
An electric Rick and Michonne, or “Richonne,” as dubbed by stans, reunion is a lofty goal. But it’s not nearly enough to save whatever the hell TWD wants to be in today’s landscape. The same storyline could’ve—and would’ve—had a weighty impact years ago, back when TOWL was envisioned as three movies to wrap up Rick’s arc (Side note: Announcing this plan after Lincoln’s exit reneged on the emotional value of him leaving). Production delays caused by the pandemic led to a limited series instead. But after all this time, the new series (four of six episodes were watched for this review) is a cry for help to stay relevant.
Don’t get us wrong, it’s still surprisingly heartrending to watch Lincoln and Gurira. They’re superb actors with an undeniable grasp of their characters, and together they’re intoxicating to watch. But is that enough? No. It’s also frustrating that Rick and Michonne’s no-holds-barred reconciliation doesn’t happen until late into the show’s run. TOWL somewhat necessarily devotes itself to fleshing out the past few years of Rick’s life with the Civic Republic Military. The organization sporadically appeared in TWD’s various offerings, but now there’s a dull insight into its evil machinations.
Here, Rick is anguished and resigned to his fate after multiple failed attempts to return to his family. His tether is a dreamy vision of his wife in a non-apocalyptic world. Meanwhile, Michonne goes through an arduous adventure of her own to reach her husband, losing friends along the way, only to eventually be met with a Rick she doesn’t fully recognize. He’s rising the CRM ranks; she desperately wants to take him back to their kids. Will they clash or team up? Underneath layers of exposition and forced plot twists lies a kernel of potential for the “epic love story” Lincoln and Gurira teased at a recent TCA panel.
An all-encompassing fourth episode digs into the nitty-gritty of Rick and Michonne’s relationship. It has hints of the movie that could’ve been. (Props to Gurira for writing the installment). It’s the series’ singular strength, but the build-up to it is drawn out and nothing TWD hasn’t done before. If the same tricks are used for spin-off number six (!), why bother? The Ones Who Live carelessly speeds through deaths, months, and events, making it hard to care. The show features supporting characters played by the likes of Lost’s Terry O’Quinn and Lucifer’s Lesley-Ann Brandt. Don’t bother investing in their outcome because the show doesn’t care about them either. O’Quinn in particular is wasted in a meandering, broadly villainous role.
TOWL doesn’t add anything inventive to the TWD lineup and it’s weak at reinventing the wheel. The only lesson to be learned is that, as profitable hard as it may be, sometimes letting go is the right answer. Not everything good lasts forever. Look, this writer shamelessly binged The Walking Dead for a long time because it was freaking compelling. It’s hard to pinpoint when the downfall began—Glenn’s (Steven Yeun) skull-bashing, Negan’s arrival, or Rick’s departure? Perhaps it was when zombies became an afterthought, let alone a credible threat. In TOWL, too, walkers don’t add to the thrill. So TWD might’ve earned its massive viewership numbers and fanbase in the early 2010s, but it has long overstayed its welcome.
This neverending abyss is worth questioning in light of AMC’s other refreshing but overlooked originals (The Terror, Halt And Catch Fire, Dark Winds, Kevin Can F**K Himself, This Is Going To Hurt, and Interview With The Vampire come to mind). How has the cable network—and we, as an audience—conspired to keep The Walking Dead alive in the year 2024? Every ounce of creativity has been squeezed from it by now. Despite Lincoln and Gurira’s genuine efforts and sultry chemistry, The Ones Who Live needs to be the final straw. Please, let’s put The Walking Dead out of its misery now.
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live premieres on AMC on February 25
49 Comments
drastic (Tales Of The Walking Dead)I don’t know what you mean by drastic, but Tales is the only one of these spinoffs I watched because it at least made an effort to breathe some creativity into the world, even if not every episode stuck the landing. If they brought it back for another season I’d definitely watch it.
Yeah, I actually quite enjoyed that series, even the groundhog day episode was fun and different.
I never watched it but upon finding out it’s an anthology I am now interested. The other shows are just too blotted.
Every episode is stand alone and one episode tie into the main series but you don’t need to have watched it to enjoy the episode.
I got tired of it years ago. So yeah, surprised its iterations are still going on.
No thanks. Rick should’ve died.
but he didnt. now he’s back. in pog form
Is this a 1 season thing? If so I may watch it so this shit ends but I get the feeling we will get a 2nd or 3rd season of this shit or Daryl’s show. I was so done with this show when Carl and then Rick was gone.
I don’t know who you mean by “Carl.” Are you talking about Rick’s son, Coral?
Shane should have killed Rick for not being able to say his own sons name right! 🙂
Still waiting on that ending eh?
I admit, I was a bigger fan in the earlier seasons. Now I just casually watch it for popcorn fun. But the show’s world doesn’t have the flexibility without going into a whole other level of scifi. Z-Nation while it was on did take that world into different wild directions that the Walking Dead can’t.I enjoyed sporadic seasons of Fear The Walking Dead. I found the post nuclear season was fun because it came off more like Fallout. Dead City came off like a video game, and Darryl in France was cool but by then I just not enjoying the recycled formula the show has to do. And the trailers for The Ones Who Live, didn’t give me the wow vines, but more or less the same. Which is kind of meh now. I will watch it just because those characters have been gone for some years now. I understand AMC wants to profit off this universe, but I feel with the original cast, the spin offs should be somewhat epilogue season for them. One and done or no more than two. Unlike Paramount with Star Trek, or Disney with their Marvel shows, AMC trying to do the same kind of system with The Walking Dead will remain limited. Unless they decide to go into a huge scifi route that will give them more flexibility into different directions. Then maybe it will work out. But for right now, I can only hope that The Ones Who Live will be at least some popcorn mindless fun.
I liked Daryl in France more than I thought I would ( I really like the cast), but it’s hard not to see the kid as actively trying to kill Daryl.The little sociopath casually throws a wrench into every plan Daryl or his aunt come up with to save him, with lethal consequences he seems completely unconcerned about. I mean, he untied that boat without the slightest thought how that’d affect his friends.
He may be the Antichrist instead of the Savior. He’s got that blank look.
oh yeah the kid is a dick
I don’t think it helps keeping the franchise going that there is now a buzzier, award attention getting zombie show airing on HBO that has a higher budget and talent in front of and behind the camera that’s not burned out on playing the same characters over and over again.
I’m not sure. The Last Of Us is a whole a different level of topic of discussion. But I will say that there’s plenty of content that offers a variety of choices to view and enjoy including The Last Of Us. But what AMC does have as an advantage is timing. Now that they have The Walking Dead branched out into even more “spin offs” they can release them while other shows take more than a year to create more content. They may not be massive hits, but they can also be fillers and place holders for something to like or hate until other shows finally start their seasons.
I don’t know. It might be worth watching just to see Rick not be right about everything.
I love the self-owning irony of that Simpsons meme.
The Walking Dead ending when Rick allowed Negan to punk him so bad when he first met Negan! Andrew Lincoln is a great actor, but he took his fear too far and was screaming and crying while Negan punked him! And that killed the show, because it killed the image of the hero of the show. They may as well have killed Rick off, because they killed his role!
Negan bashed two of his friends’ brains in and threatened to cut off his son’s arm…you do know a story can have a hero who suffers and is fallible, and is still a hero, right?
I thought he got punked worse when it turned out the Heapsters were on Negan’s side.
The head bashing was more of an ambush before Rick even knew much about Negan as I recall.
I like that you thought this comment was so good when you posted it in 2021 that you just decided to use it all over again. The world must know that you don’t like that Rick Grimes was “punked.”https://gizmodo.com/1847749950
Hah. I’ve gotta ask though how did you do that? This site has like…no features. I always thought if I wanted to find one of my old posts I had to go through page by page doing ctrl+f for a keyword.
I wish I could tell you I had some cool trick. It’s the sixth comment down when you look at MeLarry’s posting history.And yes, that does mean he has commented only six times in the past four years, and two of them have been about how Rick got punked by Negan.
That actually makes a lot more sense than you remembering a weird four year old comment about The Walking Dead.
(Ashton’s making the train horn noise in this image, isn’t he?)
The Walking Dead ended when they booted out Frank Darabont.
Why are you shocked that a show about zombies simply won’t die?
Every day they’re out there makin’ Dead Tales, woo-ooo!
If you want an incredible post-apocalyptic show with some hope and character I can’t recommand enough Station Eleven. I’ve watched the “Daryl in Paris” spinoff and it was not actually good but still better than a lot of the walking dead. not sure I’m intersted in whatever the rest of this thing is though.
Station Eleven was amazing. Really poor timing there with Covid and all. I know a few people who refused to watch it as it aired cause it seemed too soon.
I watched it recently while you can see some common grounds with reality it’s a vastly different situation. The show portrays the almost instant wiping out of most of humanity (and doesn’t dwell on the how and why). The reality is an agonisingly slow wipe out where understanding the how and why would make a vast difference
I can’t watch any of this stuff because I don’t like horror. But there are so many awful series out there that continue anyway; not sure how this is any worse.
We can keep the phrase “Walking Dead” though. A few years ago they assigned it to people who walk around looking at their cell phones because they keep walking into somewhat catastrophic ‘accidents’. They’re also known as Smartphone Zombies.
It’s less horror if you consider it a free-for-all makeup contest where walk-ins get to shamble their way across the scenery as cosplayers.
This show makes me love the ones that were planned as a concise fixed arc from the beginning. “Dark” and “Andor” are great examples.
Who wants a story that never ends, or just drags on until it gets unpopular enough to cancel..?
Generally you’re right, but I think it could have worked here with better execution. If you made the long term story about the world and humanity as a whole’s attempts to rebuild and maybe solve the mystery of the zombies. But they only seemed to be interested in “check it out, this new bad guy is even more evil than the last bad guy!” There was a bit there after the war with Negan where like three or four communities, including the bad guys, had to come together and attempt to rebuild some semblance of civilization. Of course they jumped ahead years and we barely got to see the tail end of it. But to me at least, that was the most interesting part of the series.
This is why episodic TV needs to make a comeback. Yes, you can stay immersed in the world – which I suspect is what most people want – but without having to have a defined end point…or keep delaying that end point ad infinitum.
Yeah, there’s nothing worse than wheel spinning.
Or ending, but the suits in the parent company want more, so wheel out some zombie seasons.Episodic stuff, I think, would work great for streaming. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, streaming producers: your 6-ep “season” budgeted at $12 million an ep that you’ll dump all at once for binging is totally gonna drag in 800 million new subscribers who totally won’t cancel after their free trial ends. Sure. But good shows that offer consistent, easy, DIDO watching, without need for fucking note taking and wiki, is great. It’s why detective shows do so well. Pick an ep, watch it. I reckon that’d build more long-term subscribers than “Here, we really only get you about fourteen hours of entertainment per year” sort of model they’ve got.
I’m hoping The Last of Us sticks to 3 – 4 seasons max (with the assumption that the plot of the second game will go across 2 seasons). I don’t know that zombie shows work well as super extended storytelling. There’s only so much you can do (and Walking Dead did a lot of it).
Those who review generally lack life skills.
People who read reviews and complain about them generally lack a life.
DON’T BAD
WATCH SHOW
He Card Read Good!
TWD started failing as soon as they got to Alexandria and introduced more characters, while relegating walkers to the background…it really went off the rails in seasons 7 & 8 with Negan…it briefly got some life back into it with the season & a half of The Whisperers, but the last 2 seasons proved that it should’ve died 5 years earlier. And Michone was so much better in the earlier years when she barely said anything and was a bad ass killing machine…then she hooked up with Rick and became boring.The producers really F’d up when they fired Frank Darabont.
This is the most stunningly inept review of a TV show that I have ever read in my life. “The Ones Who Live” is a tour de force of storytelling, cinematography, acting, directing, and editing. I feel like they were finally able to escape Robert Kirkman’s myopic storytelling and his tunnel vision like scope and tell a story of real scope and range. This show gives us everything that the original show should have been giving us from the start. It is a heart poundind, nerve tingling thrill ride from beginning to end. It encapsulates so many aspects of the human condition it is almost impossible to put it down in words. To anyone who reads this article, please for the love of God watch this show for yourself. You will not be disappointed.
Eh, the first episode was fiiiiiiiiiiiiiine. Nice to have Lincoln back. On the other hand, no pun intended, it’s kind of hilarious that NOW they decide maybe Rick needs one less hand. And this one also reinforces a valuable lesson, that no TWD person should ever spend too much time in a helicopter because it isn’t going to end well.
For me the show started falling apart halfway through the second season when they were all holed up at Herschel’s farm and we all knew that Sophia was in that barn. After that it just became predictable gore porn.