It Still Stings: The 7-Month Wait for Glenn’s Walking Dead Death

Editor’s Note: TV moves on, but we haven’t. In our new feature series It Still Stings, we relive emotional TV moments that we just can’t get over. You know the ones, where months, years, or even decades later, it still provokes a reaction? We’re here for you. We rant because we love. Or, once loved. And obviously, when discussing finales in particular, there will be spoilers:

It may be asking a lot of you, the reader, if we prompt you to think back to a time when AMC’s The Walking Dead was one of the hottest shows on television. In fact, it may feel like that period of time never happened at all, but we assure you that it did—between 2012 and 2017, in fact, almost every single episode of The Walking Dead was watched by more than 10 million simultaneous live viewers in the U.S.A. It’s a level of cable engagement that was unprecedented, and one we’ll almost certainly never see again, given the dominance of streaming services and on-demand viewing rather than scheduled programming. The Walking Dead at its peak was a phenomenon—the last big cable “water cooler” show before all the buzz moved to Netflix and beyond.

And yeah, the show still exists today, whether or not you’re aware of it. The ratings are a fraction of what they once were—still pretty damn high for cable—but a huge percentage of the audience has moved on, leaving a skeleton crew of die hards to piece together the nonsense still unfolding on the neverending zombie story as the Grimes Gang (Judith Grimes, now) struggles to overcome yet another villainous group in the form of The Whisperers. For a long time, I was among that dwindling group holding out and continuing to watch the series out of a certain sense of devotion, and I kept up weekly reviews for Paste in 2019 well past the point of those reviews feeling at all relevant. In fact, my favorite Walking Dead-related item of the last two years turned out to be some branded TWD whiskey, rather than anything I saw on my TV screen.

If I’m looking back to the moment that the show truly lost me, though? The moment when I knew there was probably no coming back, and when the purpose for my viewing shifted to “obligation” rather than pulpy enjoyment? It was the much ballyhooed death of the beloved Glen Rhee, the heart and soul of the Grimes Gang, who shuffled off this mortal coil in the Season 7 premiere, “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be.” Airing in late October of 2016, it was the payoff to an astoundingly sleazy tease of “which character will die?” that left fans of the series on the hook 7 months earlier, all in pursuit of a shameless ratings bump.

Or in other words: I was by no means upset that this show killed poor Glenn. Hell, it killed its core characters off all the time, usually in the same episode it gave you a good reason to care about them. Rather, I was completely disenchanted by the transparent ratings grubbery with which AMC delivered that death. It was a bait and switch of epic proportions, and it still stings now, four years later. Whether or not you were a reader of Robert Kirkman’s comics (I was), it came off as a prime example of greedy and exploitative TV storytelling.

Back in the day, Glenn almost died each and every week.

Not that this was new for The Walking Dead, even then. This series has a long history of baiting fans; of teasing them; of seeming to punish them for their loyalty. This is the series that advertised the death and departure of Rick Grimes for weeks, built an entire episode around his noble sacrifice, and then finished that hour of TV with a “psych! Rick’s alive and helicoptering off to some other community to star in TV movies a few years from now.” We still have no idea of what that was all about, or the rationale for Rick never returning to his family in the years that followed. Nor is there any concrete news about those films even having been written yet, much less filmed. Eight years of the story of Rick Grimes sort of just faded out like the sound of air being let out of a balloon, all because TWD never met a contrivance that it didn’t giddily embrace.

Glenn, of course, had already been the victim of another such hacky death fake-out in the beginning of Season 6—something we should have taken to heart as we came to terms with how desperate The Walking Dead had become for shock and ratings. This was of course the infamous “dumpster” incident, in which Glenn and another character (Nicholas, but that no longer matters) fall into a crowd of zombies, and the camera pans in on Glenn screaming as guts and viscera appear to be torn out of his chest and the episode comes to a close. The next few episodes embraced the “Glenn is dead” deception, even removing actor Steven Yeun’s name from the opening credits, and it’s another four episodes before the ruse is revealed—the walkers were actually munching on the other guy, while Glenn somehow scooted to safety under the dumpster. Wildly improbable, exploitative and hacky as hell? Sure. But hey, it got people talking, right? That’s the important thing.

The dumpster, though, ultimately paled in comparison with Glenn’s actual denouement, which was among the most cynical ratings grabs in cable history. Part of the reason, of course, was expectation due to how closely the scene, in which one member of the group is beaten to death by alpha douche Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), looked to be adapted straight from the comic books. Anyone who had read the comic was well aware that this scene was already infamous—the unexpected death of Glenn at the hands of Negan in the comics is one of the most gut-wrenching and unflinchingly brutal losses in The Walking Dead. So when the sixth season finale, “Last Day on Earth” aired and promos contained the scene with the whole group on their hands and knees in front of Negan and his barbed wire bat, fans knew that someone’s time had most definitely come. The only question anyone was asking was this: Is it going to be Glenn, like in the comics? Or will the show pull one of its classic subversions by killing someone else instead?