Nobody likes The Walking Dead. It was on for 11 seasons, so obviously people were watching it, but any time somebody mentions it, they have to reiterate that they were the exception: I don’t like The Walking Dead. It’s one of those shows for boring people, like The Big Bang Theory, or if Olive Garden was a show. I’m not like them. Do I look like some kind of peasant to you?

No, obviously people do watch The Walking Dead, or at least they did, and something happened that toxified it for them. They feel the need to distance themselves from ever having enjoyed it. It could just be the urge a lot of people feel to separate themselves from any kind of mainstream culture or fandom – the sort of reactive animosity some have towards things like Marvel or Star Wars – but even that doesn’t quite ring true to me. Marvel and Star Wars are so ubiquitous that reaction seems inevitable. They’re unavoidable and enormous parts of pop culture in a way that, even at its height, The Walking Dead never was.

No, I think that The Walking Dead did something to make people react that way. Having just finished watching the entire show from start to finish to satiate the feral completionist living inside my hollowed-out skull, I think I know what it is: they saw the fandom.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s start with the cliffhanger at the end of season 6. Negan came out with the bat to murder somebody, and he said a bunch of cool guy stuff, and they did all those clever first-person shots so you wouldn’t know what’s what, and then they took a season break before they told you who died. Lots of people point to that as the spot where they got sick of the show, and they’d give all sorts of reasons for it: it’s torture porn and it’s too morbid, or they felt like the show was taunting them, or they didn’t like that they ultimately killed the characters they killed, or whatever.

None of that is really the issue, though. It was always morbid torture porn. People loved that. Taunting you with the fact that you don’t know what happened over a season break is a classic TV move, which people also love. Finally, killing your favorite characters is the whole point. The show exists for you to guess who will die, and then for some of them to die. People love it.

The problem is a relatively small writing mistake that creates unforgivable conditions for the audience, and it’s even better illustrated by the earlier season 6 episode known as “the one where Glenn goes under the dumpster.” That infamous scene set up a scenario in which Glenn and Nicholas (some other guy) are trapped on top of a dumpster, surrounded by a gigantic horde of zombies, leaving you to ask yourself, “how are they going to get out of this one?” Standard stuff. Then Nicholas gives up and shoots himself, his lifeless body pushing Glenn down into the horde, and the zombies spend enough time tearing through Nicholas that Glenn is able to slip out from beneath him and under the dumpster.

It’s a reasonable enough scenario, but the audience turns against it because the camera is forced into an arbitrary perspective that makes it look like they’re not tearing through Nicholas, but through Glenn. It’s a fake-out, and a fake-out with no intermediary between the writer and the audience. If, say, some other character had been watching from a distance, and we were locked into their perspective and witnessing what looked like Glenn being torn up, I think audiences would have forgiven that. That’s an identifiable and flawed perspective, and when it later turned out that Glenn was still alive, they might be mad at that character, but not at the show. With no intermediary, it’s a personal betrayal. The show establishes a trust with you as the audience, and in a moment like that, they violate it.

The finale with Negan is ultimately not as egregious as the dumpster scene, but by that point it’s too late. The trust has been broken, and the audience is left with the earned expectation that they’re being manipulated in some way. Instead of being immersed in the story and the drama of that “who’s going to die” cliffhanger, they begin to see the inner workings of the show as a product. They see the constructs meant to elicit responses, and the ways the structure is built out for marketing, and it somehow becomes simultaneously both more and less personal. They feel the writer speaking to them directly, and it feels bad.

It was written that way, I think, because the writers became too confident that they knew what the audience was thinking. The fans love Glenn, they thought, so they’ll really care if they think we’re killing Glenn. They also knew that the comic fans were expecting Glenn’s death when Negan showed up, so they were almost certainly toying with that understanding as well. If the fans know that Glenn dies in the comics, they’ll believe that he’s dying at the dumpster. If we then show that he didn’t die, they’ll be more surprised when he does die later on.

That’s what I mean when I say they saw the fandom. Rather than telling a story on its own terms, the story started to become secondary to a back-and-forth with fan expectations. It’s a form of hubris, similar to the way Game of Thrones began falling apart as the writing engaged with the fandom. It blew up after The Red Wedding, and somebody at HBO watched YouTube reactions of people freaking out, and the rest of the show was spent desperately trying to recreate that organic fan engagement, with one-liners fit for printing on mugs and set pieces begging people to post “who’s cutting onions” on Twitter 15 minutes after the episode ends. The initial thesis of the show – an empathetic answer to traditional Great Man Theory fantasy narratives – was ultimately consumed by its own preoccupation with fandom.

The Walking Dead never quite went under the dumpster again, and by the last seasons, it had a whole different and much more general set of flaws bringing it down, but that moment illustrated a shift in the show’s perspective. It likely started much earlier, probably with the change in showrunners after season 3, when they essentially retconned the Governor’s storyline because nobody was happy with its partial resolution. They basically redid it to please a disappointed fandom, and in that case the downside wasn’t clear, because the jump in episode-to-episode quality was so immediately apparent. The general audience was happy, the fandom cheered, and just as it happened with The Red Wedding, the writers learned the wrong lesson.

None of this is to say that there’s anything wrong with fandoms, or that these shows are bad, necessarily. It’s just that the writers’ gradual internalization of the external has the arguably unfortunate result that the thing they’re making by the end of the show is not the thing they were making at the start. What began as a story that exists with or without its audience eventually became a conversation with a fandom. For the people in that fandom, that might be an improvement, but for everybody else, you’re out of luck.

And in conclusion: this is all because of Lost.