In its final season, “The Walking Dead” has come to resemble something of a hobbling corpse itself, writes “Streaming” columnist  NICK OVERALL.

AT its height, the zombie apocalypse horror drama “The Walking Dead” was pulling in more than 14 million viewers every week. Fans from around the world were eager to see if their favourites in an ensemble of survivors would make it through another episode alive.

Now, in its eleventh and final season streaming weekly on Binge, the show can’t even crack the two-million viewer mark. Fewer people are watching it than there were during the first season.

How has “The Walking Dead” fallen so far from grace and, as it wraps things up this year, will this once television phenomenon still be able to leave some kind of legacy?

Rewind to 2010, and one of the best television pilots of all time hit TV screens.

The first episode of “The Walking Dead” dropped viewers into Atlanta, Georgia, with Rick Grimes, a police sheriff who awakens from a coma to a world overrun by walking corpses and who goes on a desperate search for his family.

Adapted from a compendium of comic books, the show struck a balance between pulpy action and character drama that immediately hooked audiences and kicked off a decade that would see television enter a new golden age.

By the fourth season, with a cast of characters well entrenched in the plot and an unpredictable villain thrown in the mix, “The Walking Dead” was receiving record-breaking ratings and inspired the ambitions of many other TV blockbusters that would follow.

So where did it go wrong?

While some argue it’s zombie fatigue setting in, it’s clear that the appetite for the subgenre is certainly still out there.

Just recently Netflix has proven that to be the case with its South Korean hit “All of Us Are Dead”, which sets a high school as ground zero for an undead outbreak. The show quickly hit the streaming platform’s number one spot last month.

But trace the popularity of the subgenre backwards and one can find it has an almost timeless presence in pop culture.

Nearly a decade before “The Walking Dead” was the British horror hit “28 Days Later”, which saw its protagonist awaken in a hospital in London to find the world overrun by the undead. 

Sound familiar? Try this.

In 1951 British novelist John Wyndham wrote “The Day of the Triffids”, which yet again was about a man who awakens in a hospital to find his city overgrown with man-eating plants and which also spawned a popular 1962 film. 

Come 1968, George Romero dropped the first movie of his famous cult zombie trilogy that spanned three decades. Today, “Night of the Living Dead”, “Dawn of the Dead” and “Day of the Dead” all hold pride of place on Amazon Prime Video, Binge and Netflix respectively.

“The Walking Dead” took the consistent cult popularity of this subgenre and plugged it into an extended television format, for the first time giving viewers more time to soak in an apocalyptic setting over multiple seasons.

But while exciting at the start, it would unfortunately turn out to be a case of too much of a good thing.

Excited by the record-breaking ratings, the producers went on to make not one, but two separate spin-offs of the show that have aired all while the original is still running.

There was “Fear the Walking Dead”, about another set of survivors from Los Angeles, but it was the second spin-off “The Walking Dead: World Beyond” where the franchise really shot itself in the foot.

This one followed a group of teenagers who are living in the apocalypse 10 years after the events of the main show. That’s right, 10 years after. What that did was outright tell viewers they weren’t getting a resolution to the main series that they had already been watching for 10 years.

Part of “The Walking Dead’s” bite was also the unpredictable shelf life of its main characters. Anyone could die in any episode kept audiences stuck to their screens.

However, in its final seasons, the show has been too frightened to lose any more of its fan favourites out of fear of losing room to expand the franchise even further. Unsurprisingly, there’s already talk of movie spin-offs.

And that’s the problem that plagues this franchise. When people invest in a story, they need an end in sight and much like one of its walkers, “The Walking Dead” just won’t die. 

While it’s yet to be seen how well the final episode will “wrap things up” there’s not much meat left on the bones to make it worth the wait.

Despite this, there is some kind of legacy “The Walking Dead” will hold on to. It’s a series with the ambitions that helped kickstart the golden age of television we’re in now, and one that would ultimately inspire many far better television shows we have the selection of today.

For that, it deserves its spot in TV history, even if it’s one series that at this point is better left buried.