‘The Walking Dead’ Creator Reveals His Biggest Regret About the Series

There’s a certain amount of nobility in admitting your faults as a TV showrunner. Damon Lindelof took it pretty badly when George R.R. Martin rubbished the god-awful ending he conceived for LOST and I would imagine that any attempt to persuade Matt Groening to finally put a bullet in The Simpsons and end the suffering wouldn’t go down particularly well. There’s not a lot of bad to say about The Walking Dead in its current state, other than the fact that it perhaps works better in other formats (or Lego), but creator Robert Kirkman has still been honest and forthcoming enough to admit that certain parts of the show didn’t entirely satisfy him.

“If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have done the CDC episode [at the end of season one],” Kirkman explained to the Hollywood reporter, referring to the CDC revellation that the infection has spread to everyone. “It possibly gave away too much information and was such a big change very early on in the series,”

“I feel like there might have been a better way to wrap up the first season,” He continued. “It ended up being a fun episode. I love the character of Dr. Jenner and thought Noah did an amazing job. But there were things in that episode that I think seem very much not of The Walking Dead world.”

It’s a very commendable thing to highlight the flaws in your own brainchild, adapted or otherwise. Joss Whedon has been similarly honest about Buffy in the past. That being said, it is widely agreed that TWD didn’t really start picking up momentum until later on and it seems unlikely that Kirkman would be quite so quick to list issues he has with season 4 or 5. With season 5 wrapped up, a second, companion show is set to start airing in 2015. Not a lot of information is readily available yet, but it’s been suggested that it will be a prequel, set during the early days of the outbreak. Watch this space.