“They did a terrible job with him,” says Daniella. Daniella responded with a resounding YES. I asked our social media guru and TWD authority Daniella Bondar whether she concurred with Lawler’s assessment. His evil machinations were more annoying than threatening, his dialogue was flat and his scenes a slog. In most of his scenes, he brought the momentum to a dead stop. Yes, Negan’s scenes were grotesque, but they were also utterly dull. Instead, The Walking Dead spent “16 episodes demonstrating his depravity,” and even worse, all of this repetitive violence wasn’t even interesting: “This barrage of barbarity quickly became monotonous. She praises Morgan for being a good actor, but says that his portrayal leaves Negan as simply surface-level evil, without the substance or conflict that makes for a truly great villain. When Negan finally surfaced, I was already tired of him. But that choice made the build-up to Negan’s first appearance seem forced. The threat posed by Negan and his followers was never clearly articulated, and it was impossible to make him seem truly menacing, partly due to the fact that our heroes underestimated him. The character is a big presence in the comic books on which the series is based, and the TV version seemed to rely on that extratextual knowledge to give the character gravitas and depth, rather than actually earning it. Most damningly, Lawler argues that Negan was never fleshed out or presented well in the first place:įrom nearly the moment it began to name-drop the villain early in Season 6 (Nov. Instead, “The villain has been at the center of nearly every storyline for nearly two years, and he’s a repulsive, tiresome and - worst of all - boring antagonist.” She lays the blame for Season 7’s ratings decline squarely on the show featuring Negan and his attendant plotlines so prominently. “Negan is still alive, kicking and siphoning off what little energy the aging series has left,” Lawler writes, explaining that she’d expected Negan to be killed off a long time ago. That’s why I was struck by a take in USA Today by Kelly Lawler, whose headline declares, “ The Walking Dead needs to kill Negan to survive.” In the article, Lawler argues that Negan has overstayed his welcome by whole seasons, and is now bogging down the entire show. I figured that Negan’s ubiquity made him the character that everyone loved-or at least loved to hate. When a villain has a named weapon that even non-fans can identify on sight, that’s pretty damned impressive. Since then I hadn’t heard much noise about Negan, though at this year’s New York Comic Con, I spotted many Negan cosplayers, and several merch tables were selling officially licensed replicas of his barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat, Lucille. So I had known about actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s much-touted rollout as the iconic comic’s villain Negan, and read the many takes during the agonizing season break while fans waited to discover who Negan had first killed on the main cast. But as a pop culture writer, I try to stay apprised of what’s happening, and I’ve kept up on Walking Dead news throughout the years, reading recaps and articles on major twists and plotlines and, of course, the splashiest deaths. I haven’t watched The Walking Dead since its first season (if you read my articles, you’ll have seen my many confessions to being easily frightened and generally avoiding horror).
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