Robert Kirkman is one of the most renowned writers for killing off key characters in his stories. In fact, he even pushed for The Walking Dead to kill off Daryl Dixon.
There was a time back in the 2010s when The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones were the two biggest shows on television. Both of them were different in a lot of ways; one a zombie survival show and the other a medieval fantasy epic. However, they both shared one common trait: they loved to kill off main characters. Both shows had myriad shocking moments throughout. Perhaps most notably in Game of Thrones was the Red Wedding, while The Walking Dead‘s brutality peaked with Negan beating both Abraham and Glenn to death.
Overall, The Walking Dead — arguably — showed the most restraint of the two, keeping alive its core characters, such as Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus), Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride), Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan), and so on. However, if Robert Kirkman, the creator of the comics and producer of the show, had his way, then fan-favorite Daryl Dixon would be dead. In fact, he ardently vied to have Daryl killed off in the writers room.
“When we started on Walking Dead I was the lunatic in the writers’ room who was like, ‘I don’t know, just kill the main character, who cares? We’ll do something weird’,” he at Annecy, per Deadine. “I was pushing to kill Daryl Dixon for a while. Any character in The Walking Dead at some point I was in the writers’ rooms saying, ‘Why don’t we kill them today?’.”
Kirkman sees himself as a mere learner compared to Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin — an author renowned for killing off his key characters. “He is the master and I am but the learner,” he said. “He is way better at killing characters than me.”
Of course, Kirkman got his wish of killing characters a lot of the time, but killing off Daryl was perhaps a step too far. Star Norman Reedus went on to basically lead the show as Daryl after Andrew Lincoln bowed out before returning in spinoff The Ones Who Live. Daryl Dixon is still going strong in his own spinoff, which concludes with its fourth season later this year.
As a producer of the TV adaptation of his comics, Kirkman often found himself frustrated that the show would stick to his own source material. “One of the things I thought was the coolest thing about the comics was you never knew what was going to happen next and it bugged me there was this source material [in the TV show] where you could kind of get a roadmap of what was coming,” he said. “And so I thought it would be cool to change that stuff. And we did change a lot of big things in The Walking Dead. As you get into later seasons you have this hodge podge of trying to take stories that work for characters that were still alive in the comics but were dead in the show. It becomes tedious and frustrating.”
Kirkman has had the chance to chance his own source material again with Prime Video’s adaptation of Invincible. In the latest season of that, he wrote in an entirely original plotline (granted, in terms of ratings, it wasn’t the strongest episode of the season).
The Walking Dead returns in July with The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3.
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