When (if ever) did ''The Walking Dead'' lose its spark for you?

I'll be uncharacteristically honest and say that the "spark," as you call it, went out when Darabont was booted from the show. It was his baby and should have stayed that way. Doesn't matter, though, because I'm a hardcore Nicotero fan. As long as he and his crew keep cranking out extreme gore set pieces, I will continue to follow the show. That said, I've only rarely watched broadcast commercial episodes. I loathe commercial breaks and refuse to watch the show that way. I own all the DVD sets and have binged my way through them several times. This practice tends to make episodes and seasons more cohesive, though it also makes weaknesses of the show more obvious. I don't care; Nicotero rules.

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For me it happened in phases over time.

I binge watched the first 4 seasons. The experience is different when you can just watch back to back. Once I caught up to real time, I had a week or more between episodes to contemplate just how absurd things were or how slow and drawn out the seasons really are.

That began phase 2 - hate watching. I don't care for that term, but that's what has been used to describe watching solely to discuss the problems from one episode to the next. I didn't actually hate the show, but it began to be more fun to commiserate with other fans from imdb on the flaws than what I got from the show itself. Which leads me to...

phase 3 - imdb boards shutting down. With few people to commiserate with, I began to lose interest pretty quickly. I was hoping the arrival of Negan would shake things up and make it more interesting. But this nonsense just went off the rails. Negan was so sadistic and made their lives so miserable, but they had so many opportunities early on to just kill him. Like, he's right there, just fucking pop him. WTF?

That was the end for me. I think it was S7E4. He's standing at the gate hitting walkers with a bat talking about "service." So stupid. Anyway that was it for me.

AFTER THE PRISON...THE GOVERNOR WAS TOUGH TO TAKE BUT AT LEAST MERLE WAS BACK.

When the so called "war" broke out between the saviours and our heroes. Laughable. After that I have kept watching primarily because of Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Negan). He has been getting more screen time lately, which is promising.

I watched the first three seasons and started the fourth... and gave up. I like the first seasons, even though they dragged on a bit. But then I realized how formulaic and repetitive it was.

The other issues I had with the show: the characters' intelligence was unstable. Sometimes they were smart and made the right decision, sometimes they were really stupid. The conflicts between the characters were ofter REALLY forced. I personally thought that the dialogues were lame at times.

Otherwise, I think that it started on a high note and managed to keep my interest. But then when I realized that they will simply keep doing the same formula and introduce more and more despicable characters, I realized that there was no way I would watch every seasons anyway. I might give it a second go and at least finish the fourth season one of these days.

The biggest punctuation point was when Negan came aboard and that first episode of the season where he bashed in Glen's and Abraham's head. I did not ever pay again to watch the show and just waited for it to stream on wherever the hell it was streaming. That was ugly and pointless and was the start of TWD just seeing how disgusting and low they could go.

I read the comic first, left them around the leaving of the jail area.
When the show started I watched episode one. I was pleased but found it surplus to the comic so I quit.

I watched up to the death of Glen, then probably about a half a season after that.

But by then I was already disenchanted with it, after the prison is when I wasn’t enjoying it so much.

You couldn’t pay me to watch it now!