By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Usually, when we discuss why something failed as part of our Why It Failed series, it’s about an entire movie or series that underperformed or missed the mark. This time, I’m doing something different. Instead of looking at an entire show, I’m magnifying one specific decision.
It was a decision so bad, so disastrous, that it wiped out not just a television show’s ratings but its entire future. One decision, one moment that completely destroyed the most popular series on television.
This is why killing Glenn failed.
The Walking Dead’s Once In A Generation Popularity
By the time The Walking Dead reached Season 7 in 2016, it was the biggest show on cable television, pulling in over 17 million viewers for its Season 7 premiere and dominating pop culture. The series was on its way to solidifying a place as one of the all-time great television shows.
In the season 7 opener, The Walking Dead threw it all away. The show killed off Glenn Rhee in season 7’s first episode. It was a turning point that the series never recovered from.
From the outside looking in, that being the thing that destroyed the show might not make any sense. The series had killed off dozens of primary characters by then. Killing off beloved characters had become The Walking Dead’s trademark, and that was precisely the problem.
By season 7, viewers had already begun questioning why they were watching the show. Week after week, The Walking Dead delivered endless moments of misery and death. Things never got better, and characters you loved were always getting eaten.
Viewers Began To Feel As Though They Were Being Abused
Glenn Rhee, played by Steven Yeun, had been with the show since its second episode. He was one of the very few left who’d survived from the original cast.
He wasn’t just a survivor; he was smart, loyal, and resourceful. He was the moral compass who’d saved Rick, gotten the group out of countless jams, and built a believable, heartfelt relationship with Maggie (Lauren Cohan). He was the only consistent bright spot in a show built around endless suffering.
And yet, The Walking Dead had already been taking Glenn for granted. In season six, the show put together an arc that faked Glenn’s death and then toyed with the viewers over whether he was alive or not. Maybe that was their way of prepping the audience for when they actually did kill him, but for fans, it was beginning to feel like they were being abused.
Why Killing Glenn Drove Viewers Away
When in the season 7 premiere, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) bludgeoned Glenn to death with a baseball bat in front of the entire group, the loss hit hard. But it wasn’t just the death; it was how it was done. The lingering close-ups of his crushed skull, the infamous “eye pop,” and the prolonged sadism made it feel less like drama and more like punishment for watching.
Viewers had endured plenty of character deaths before, but Glenn’s execution crossed a line. People began to question why they were still watching this, wondering what there was to root for. Those weren’t questions The Walking Dead wanted its audience asking because once they did, the answer was nothing.
Walking Dead’s Massive Ratings Drop After Glenn’s Death
Ratings immediately dipped. 17 million watched Glenn’s murder. Only 12 million were still watching the next episode. Only 11 million for the third. That decline never stopped. It kept accelerating. By the show’s final season, it averaged fewer than two million viewers per episode.
The Walking Dead movie AMC announced never happened. It was canceled and eventually reworked into a six episode miniseries which, predictably, no one watched. It barely managed a million viewers.
The Walking Dead’s Viewers Needed Safety
When they killed Glenn, the emotional heart of the show was gone, replaced by grim shock value. The show’s production team thought they were being edgy by proving that no one was safe, but viewers already knew that. What their audience needed was to feel safe, and The Walking Dead took that away from them.
Defenders of the move like to point out that Glenn also died in the comics, but that’s irrelevant. By season 7, The Walking Dead had firmly established that it wasn’t sticking to comic book canon.
Beyond that, this source material argument misses the importance of the way the death was handled. They didn’t just kill the only ray of hope on the show; they stomped it into the ground and spat on it.
In doing so, they wiped out The Walking Dead’s future legacy. What was once the biggest television show, beloved by tens of millions of ardent fans, is no longer talked about. In the age of endless streaming binging, where everything old is new again, The Walking Dead is actually dead. It’s payback for what they did to Glenn.
