'Walking Dead' Ratings Hold Steady for Mid-Season Finale

On the bright side, ratings for this week's mid-season finale of The Walking Dead were just about the same as they were last week. On the darker side, those ratings represent a giant decline from the series' peak popularity and are holding steadyat levels last seen in the second season.

Eric Kain at Forbes has an idea of what's causing the decline, and his recommendation for fixing the problem is drastic. Be warned: there are major spoilers for the latest episode below.

Via Forbes.

Last night, The Walking Dead gave us one of the worst midseason finales the show has ever aired. It was terrible in almost every conceivable way.

The story, which sees a Savior counter-attack against Rick's people, was riddled with plot holes and inconsistencies, capping off  the first half to a truly terrible eighth season.

And to make matters worse, we learn at the end that they've killed off Carl Grimes (Chandler Riggs) one of the most important characters in both the show and the comics. It's bizarre. Everything about the show these days is bizarre. It's certainly not the show we used to watch and love.

If You Love Something...

I'm told quite often by angry fans that I should just stop watching if I don't like it. That's a peculiar response for two reasons.

First, I do this as part of my job. I'm a professional critic who writes reviews of TV shows, movies and video games. Sometimes I love the things I review and sometimes I don't. I'd be a pretty lousy critic if I only wrote uncritically about stuff I liked!

The second reason I find this kind of thinking bizarre is that ratings matter. If enough people take this advice, The Walking Dead's ratings will fall. They've been falling already. Now it seems the show's most diehard fans would like people to stop watching the show so that they can fall even further! This makes no sense to me.

I, on the other hand, want the show's ratings to improve. As a critic, one of my goals is to point out the flaws in something like The Walking Dead in the hopes that its creators will listen and adapt. Criticism is far more useful and beneficial than blind fandom. Sure, the critics aren't always right (and I'm not always right, either) but certainly listening to both positive and negative voices is part of a big creative endeavor like making a major TV show. Critical voices can help showrunners, producers and writers improve. In some ways, we're like the canary in the coal mine: We can help creative people avoid disaster.

And disaster is coming to The Walking Dead. Ratings continue to slide. The show's Rotten Tomatoes score is slipping precariously closer to Rotten. Reading through the show's Reddit discussions illustrates just how many fans are angry.

It All Comes Down To Gimple

Time and again I try to understand just what it is about this show that's making it go downhill so rapidly. Partly it's just where the show has gone and its bizarre change of tone. You can attribute that to the cartoonish villain, Negan, and to the rest of the cartoonish, unbelievable characters like King Ezekiel, the Trash People and Eugene. None of these characters talk like real people and it's grating and annoying.

Partly, too, is the substandard production values lately. Bad choreography, inconsistent plot details, shoddy lighting and sound, and utterly atrocious editing all combine with sloppy dialogue and...well, you get the point. Across every corner of The Walking Dead, there are problems both great and small.

So what's the one thing tying all this together? What's at the center of this mess? Better yet, who?

The answer is simple: Scott Gimple.

Get the rest of the story at Forbes.

Do you agree that Scott GImple is to blame for most of TWD's troubles? Let us know in the comments below.