Edit: changed to season thread. Not a single comment after two days.

So it seems that Talking Dead is on "hiatus" until after the mid-season finale of FTWD. I guess people don't stick around to watch it when they schedule another AMC (NOS4A2) before it. You'd think they'd stick with it considering it has to be dirt cheap. Please, AMC, we don't want to have to see Chris Hardwick try and get another job.

I kind of like the nuclear disaster thing they had going on in ep2, but my care-o-meter about the characters is pretty low right now.

Shit, now I really want to see more about this secret group. I hope we find out what that shit is about.

https://deadline.com/2019/07/fear-th...mc-1202649322/

Renewed for a 6th season today

The Mid season finale is this Sunday.

I've been busy catching up on other things, so I have not started season 5 yet. I will though. But, I see that interest has massively fallen off here.

I've been watching it, but haven't really seen anything I felt like talking about.

The show has fully devolved into a long string of preposterous events broken up only by a staggering number of monotonous speeches on redemption and helping people against their will. Barring the cast getting wiped out during their ludicrous plan to fly an airplane over the notoriously impassable Texas mountains the show has moved beyond salvaging.

It's rare for me to give up on a tv series that I really enjoyed in the beginning. In fact, FTWD might be the first. I even hung in with shows like Prison Break and Battlestar Galactica which turned into turd territory in their final seasons. But Fear is now so bad that it has become almost unbearable to watch. I made it to the episode called Skidmarks feeling completely clueless to what the hell the characters were doing, and even losing track of who went where and why. The show had just massive leaps in logic that went well beyond the norm stupidity of Walking Dead like Dwight driving cross country and just happening to run into this group. Thousands of miles, thousands of towns and he just happened on the same one. It also seems like someone was always getting stabbed and just magically heal up the next day.

With so many episodes ahead of me, I just lost all desire continue on and deleted the series from my DVR. Apparently I'm not the only one. Viewership is way down, the reddit forum is full of people trashing the show and the lack of any discussion on this season here also confirms that this series is completely in the toilet. I'm just baffled why the writers let this show fall over a cliff. It took a nose dive when they killed off main characters like Madison. Morgan could have been an interesting addition, but his character was just mopey and inconsistent and never did anything interesting. Fear worked best when it was showing ways that society was desperately trying to survive and continued to break down even more. This gave the show a different flavor from Walking Dead which kept the group in the same spot but always had some main villain as the main focus of the season. Just hard to believe writers all agreed that creating this mess of a season would be exciting tv. It's like the show creators are just fatigued and have zero direction or end game for the series. I can't imagine anyone enjoying this season.

I don't know the creative history of the current showrunners, but with this season the show has taken on a more traditional episodic format. Each episode focuses on one or two key characters/actors (which may be a budgetary/scheduling consideration), with a "B" story using another couple of characters. Each of these stories gets to a resolution of some sort within the episode.

The current showrunners were the EPs of Once Upon a Time.

That sort of makes sense, -almost every main character this season has been given a romantic interest for the audience to "ship"...

Its sort of crazy as I was a big fan of this show at the start but I had not even realized it came back on until I saw a post about it on Facebook as one of the caricatures played a Traveling Williburies song a few weeks ago and someone posted on the Tom Petty FB page about it. I have no idea when TWD comes back and its rather freeing to not feel compelled to watch either of these shows anymore... Seems most folks here have given up even hate watching it. Cant believe they renewed this but I guess AMC hasn't got much else going for them...

I'm really sick of the whole "documentary" aspect of the show now. Don't these people have better things to do than making video interviews? Especially this past episode where most of the episode was supposed to be footage from their video camera. How are they able to keep recharging the batteries?

Whether or not you're buying it, they have explained these things, -the "videos" are "Al"'s thing that drives her, which the gang has repurposed into a motivation for the group. The batteries have been addressed on occasion, including this last episode. I do feel the whole "We're here to help" thing is a bit heavy-handed, but, again, I suppose that's part of the new format, to give them a "one-line" purpose for the audience and make them more appealing than the previous group of characters, who were mostly unpleasant and angry, didn't get along, per se, and were driven by self-interest.

Well, I'm probably only paying half attention to the show now. How did they explain the batteries for the camcorder?

It just boiled down to Al being asked if she had a battery (for the camera) and she gestured to one on her desk. I didn't say it was a white board discussion but they addressed it.

Been a long time coming but I finally cancelled the season pass on my TiVo. Watched the first 10 minutes of Sunday night's episode and had enough.

I'll watch the finale this weekend, but I do not foresee myself returning for the next season. After this garbage season and how much the viewership dropped, I can't believe they renewed it.

Because AMC envisions this and additional TWD spin-offs to stay on the air for the next 12-15 years, right beside their flagship show?

At this time, it still pulls audiences second to the original, which is AMC's biggest show.

According to Wikipedia listing:
Season 1 of FTWD started with 10.13 million viewers.
Season 2 of FTWD started with 6.67 million viewers.
Season 3 of FTWD started with 3.11 million viewers.
Season 4 of FTWD started with 4.09 million viewers.
Season 5 of FTWD started with 1.97 million viewers.

If it keeps up with that trend, it'll be less than a million viewers for most of Season 6, and practically out of them by Season 7.

Meanwhile TWD main series lowest viewership numbers (Season 1 & Season 9) were about on par with FTWD's Season 2.

Season 9 of TWD main saw nearly a 6 million viewer drop in comparison to Season 8 and that was after Season 8 had already seen a 6 million viewer drop in comparison to Season 7.

So between Season 7 and Season 9, the main series lost a little over 11 million viewers.

But yeah, clearly AMC can keep this going for another 12-15 years. :^)

I made it thru the the first episode of the season... quickly lost all interest. Waste of a good cast.

This is such a perfect summary. I always have to check to make sure I'm at the right episode because I'm totally lost on who is where and for what reason. Character motivations are totally shoehorned into what the writers need. Trying to clear DVR space and I pretty much have to force myself to make it through episodes. It's a struggle. I don't quit shows but I think I have to tap here, it's just excruciating and I hate pretty much every character at this point and want everyone to die. Al and her stupid fucking videos and Dwight running into the group have to be the "incredulity highlights." Seriously the odds of Dwight not only running into this group but befriending them is so insanely low it just bothers me. It's hard to believe they've completely ruined something so seemingly foolproof as the zombie apocalypse.

AND MORGAN! What are the odds of both Dwight AND Morgan running into this group?!