When I watched the entirety of Daryl Dixon, the new Walking Dead spin-off starring (you know who) and set in France, I didn’t really like it as much as I did the base show or the other recent spin-off Dead City. Well, I appear have been in the minority on this one.
I am one of just a handful of negative reviews of the series, and actually looking into this, it appears that Daryl Dixon is both the highest critic and fan-rated show in the entire Walking Dead series, which is made up of six shows of varying lengths. Here they are in order:
- The Walking Dead (11 seasons) – 79% critic score, 78% audience score
- Fear the Walking Dead (8 seasons) – 73% critic score, 59% audience score
- The Walking Dead: World Beyond (2 seasons) – 46% critic score, 35% audience score
- Tales of the Walking Dead (1 season) – 74% critic score, 57% audience score
- The Walking Dead: Dead City (1 season, renewed for 2) – 81% critic score, 79% audience score
- The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (1 season, renewed for 2) – 90% critic score, 89% audience score.
So, what to take away from this? The original series was still pretty highly rated in the end, despite some severe fluctuations in quality over the years. The lowest rated show by far is the YA-ish Walking Dead World Beyond, meant to be a short, 20 episode series from its conception.
But the big story is that AMC’s originally mocked idea to do spin-off shows starring main TWD cast members appears to have…worked quite well. Both Dead City, starring Negan and Maggie, and Daryl Dixon, starring Daryl, are highly rated, with Daryl Dixon in particular reviewing way above everything else on both the critic and audience side.
Both shows have one thing in common, taking beloved TWD characters and putting them in shows focused on just them, not some wide ensemble cast where they only get 7 minutes of screen time an episode. And they are short, just six episodes that feel impactful, rather than sprawling 16 episode seasons broken in half that feel dragged out. Though TWD and Fear also both started with 6 episode first seasons, so we’ll see if these two shows expand.
Was I wrong about Daryl Dixon? I am sort of in “perhaps I judged you too harshly” territory here. The main things I didn’t like about the show were Laurent, who I find deeply annoying, and the fact that Laurent’s story so closely mirrors Ellie’s in The Last of Us, complete with his mother being bitten at his birth, explaining his “uniqueness.” That said, I have to concede that some of this is bad luck, as TLOU’s Ellie reveal was not from the games, it was just from the show, so Daryl Dixon didn’t “steal” it here.
I was surprised when Erik Kain, my friend, colleague and notorious Fear the Walking Dead hater, said that episode 2 of Daryl Dixon was one of the best episodes of The Walking Dead ever. I did go back and rewatch it, and I think I can understand why it was better than I might have originally thought. We’ve only seen really two “outbreak start” scenes in TWD history, the beginning of Fear and now this one in France, and it was well done, I have to admit, on second viewing.
The series ends in a way where I am looking forward to season 2, but I won’t go into why that is until it airs. But yeah, AMC seems to have a hit here, even if I may not have loved it as much as everyone else seems to.
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Read the full article here