The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – one of TV’s strangest ever franchises refuses to die

The jeopardy of a zombie show is surely whether the characters get bitten to death or not – but somehow the stars manage to survive endlessly. Will the spinoffs ever cease?

Oh, sorry, didn’t see you there. You just caught me writing a script for AMC’s mega-franchise The Walking Dead, which finally finished in 2022 after 177 episodes and has now splintered into a number of spin-off shows which are basically just the same. I’ve got the most obvious thing in there early (a scene where someone desperately tugs on another character’s arm and goes: “Please, we have to go!” while a mass of zombies get closer and closer to pushing the door down), so just need to pad out the other 55 minutes.

What else? Oh, of course: I need someone to get bitten by a zombie and slowly transform into a zombie but the person who has to kill them is also their brother or sister or wife, so they dilly-dally and either they do kill them in the end but become a shell of a person afterwards – or they mess about so long that they also get bitten by a zombie and die. Got to have an adult having an unbearable conversation with a child, obviously. A scene where a man gets a rifle out of the flatbed of a truck and goes: “No, you stay here – it’s safer,” before messing up their mission in a way where a second person could have been really helpful. A rumour about another city actually being safe, someone’s lost their husband and can’t find them, and the group taking refuge in a building you wouldn’t expect them to take refuge in. Right, that’s 60 pages. AMC, I’ll send you an invoice.