6) Daryl Kicking Ass… And Staying Alive!
One strength of The Walking Dead is its willingness to break away from the source material when necessary, mixing things up for diehard fan while still remaining faithful to Robert Kirkman’s original comics. The smartest choice the showrunners ever made in this regard was creating Daryl, the crossbow wielding survival expert who quickly became a firm fan favourite early on in the program’s run.
The problem is that Daryl has become almost too popular, leading many to believe that he is one of the few cast members guaranteed to survive, which grinds Kirkman’s gears. At the San Diego Comic-Con in 2014, Kirkman said:
That fan reaction is going to get him killed. I feel like it’s a dare. Like, ‘Oh, really? You’re gonna riot? We’ll see…we’ll see. No one is safe.
This was reiterated once again more recently in an interview with CNN, where Kirkman stated:
No, no one is safe, definitely not. Looking at you Norman Reedus.
Ok Kirkman, we get it.
The issue here is that Daryl has no counterpart in the comics, so it’s hard to tell whether this threat is genuine or not. Killing off a character as popular as Daryl would be an extremely bold move that could divide audiences in two, so let’s hope Kirkman is just bluffing.