As we come to the end of the 2010s, it’s fair to say we’ve lived through one of the richest periods in television history. Although it hasn’t won some of the awards and critical plaudits as other shows of the decade, AMC’s The Walking Dead has been a consistent success during this era, to the extent that we’ll be getting new episodes from the franchise almost every Sunday in 2020.
Furthermore, the series’ success has now been recognized by TV Guide, who named The Walking Dead one of the decade’s seven most influential programs. Other shows flagged by TV Guide for their impact include American Horror Story for making the anthology series a going concern, Game of Thrones for providing the blueprint for a mega-budget genre series, and Making a Murderer for popularizing true crime documentaries. Also, Netflix’s House of Cards is recognized for paving the way for the success of streaming series, Girls for its millennial importance and Arrow for launching a shared universe of superhero programming.
The Walking Dead‘s varied achievements include proving that a non-mainstream comic book can draw an audience, which has since produced the likes of Preacher, while also making television zombies lucrative business for networks. The show is still going strong in its tenth season, too, despite a recent dip in ratings. Spinoff Fear the Walking Dead, meanwhile, which launched in 2015, and an as-yet-unnamed new series launching in 2020, have only added to this success. Throw in a series of movies with Rick Grimes and we have one of the more lucrative franchises of the decade.
As previously mentioned, we’ll be getting 42 Sundays worth of TWD content on AMC next year, hopefully with some bold ideas for taking the franchise forward into the 2020s. What do you think, though, about The Walking Dead being one of the most important shows of the current decade? Are there any other programs that deserve to be held up as the best and most innovative? As ever, share your thoughts in the comments section down below.