Simply by taking place during the post-apocalypse, The Walking Dead franchise is one of TV’s deadliest, and remains that way thanks to spinoffs starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan, among others. The co-stars’ characters Negan and Maggie first shared the screen in the Season 6 finale and then in the infamous Season 7 premiere, in which the leather-clad villain brutally killed off two fan-favorite characters. It’s been roughly eight years since that viewership-killing episode aired, so how does TWD vet Andrew LIncoln feel about it now?
As it happens, Lincoln is able to look back at Negan’s introduction in hindsight and say that it may have been the straw that broke the zombie camel’s back, so to speak. In an interview with Empire, he said:
I do still think [Glenn’s death] might have been when we over-egged the omelet. Maybe it was lingering too much.
That’s a major “maybe” in the scheme of things, since The Walking Dead’s creative team definitely wanted to hammer home just how emotionally devastating Negan’s arrival was the way Robert Kirkman penned it for the comic book. To the point where Charlie Adlard’s gnarly visuals were partially represented in the form of Steven Yeun’s bulging eye-socket prosthetic, which the show made sure to focus on applicably.
Of course, before he even got around to smooshing in Glenn’s head in front of his pregnant wife, JDM’s Negan had already viciously murdered Abraham in a similar manner, with the red-headed behemoth’s body still twitching in the moments afterward. The times were not so optimistic.
To that end, The Walking Dead’s Season 7 premiere was among the two or three most-watched episodes of the show’s 11-season run, with more than 17 million people tuning in early on. The series enjoyed those double-digit viewership totals for several seasons prior to Negan’s arrival, and it’s unlikely any other AMC series will ever reach that same level of popularity. But once Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s joyously callous villain became a mainstay, the audience decline was quite obvious., and many were quite up front about why Glenn's death was so upsetting.
Not that Andrew Lincoln felt any sort of foreboding viewership threats when filming the controversial sequence, and only has good things to say about that experience, and about Morgan in general. As he put it:
One of the nicest guys you’re ever going to meet, playing one of the most unpleasant characters. He had to do this extraordinary monologue on his first day at work, and everybody was on their knees and weeping when they weren’t on camera. [Morgan] came over and went, ‘Is this normal?’ I went, ‘Yeah, everybody just keeps going.’ It was an extraordinary night.
It was definitely an emotional shoot, as it was by and large the last time the cast would spend that much time around stars Steven Yeun and Michael Cudlitz, though the latter later returned for Abraham's dream sequences with Sonequa Martin-Green's Sasha. But as much as fans have wanted to see Yeun back as Glenn in any upcoming Walking Dead series, even if just in the anthology spinoff, he's expressed hesitance about returning to the role.
While waiting to see more from Negan in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2, head to our 2024 TV premiere schedule to see what else is coming soon.
