Jeffrey Dean Morgan Had One Issue With Negan's Ending On The Walking Dead

"The Walking Dead" has been a cash cow series for AMC since it debuted in 2010. A huge beneficiary of the zombie renaissance kicked off by Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" and Edgar Wright's "Shaun of the Dead," the show turned Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore's gore-soaked comic book into gripping television for almost a whole season. When Frank Darabont, the show's developer and showrunner, got hamstrung by budget cuts and increased episode orders, the writer-director of "The Shawshank Redemption" bolted the series, leaving its flesh-gnawing future in the hands of Glen Mazzara.

For the next 10 seasons, "The Walking Dead" appealed to viewers via its practical, stomach-turning gore FX (supervised by the great Greg Nicotero) and its stone-hearted willingness to dispatch likeable characters at the drop of a hat. Or a bat. Repeatedly.

Many fans of "The Walking Dead" will tell you that the series was starting to run out of juice before Jeffrey Dean Morgan showed up in the final episode of season 6 as Negan. Suddenly, with his burly presence, mirthful malevolence, and horrifyingly lethal baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, this leader of the Saviors took center stage as the show's most fearsome death dealer. Getting eaten alive by zombies seemed like a better deal than getting your brains bashed in by this all-too-human monster.

Negan was too dynamic a character to meet the quick, righteously violent end he deserved, so "The Walking Dead," taking its cue from the comics, kept him around until the series finale. Along the way, he acquired a degree of depth and a sense of purpose that wasn't entirely barbaric. But Morgan thinks the final episode of "The Walking Dead" gave his character a too-tidy send-off.

In a 2023 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Morgan revealed that he was unhappy with Negan remarrying. The character's fury was driven by the loss of his first wife, Lucille (he named his bat after her), which left Morgan questioning the decision to have him wed Annie (Beth Keener). As the actor told EW, "We never saw the story of how he met [Annie], and why he would've married her, which always kind of bummed me out, because I think he was so in love with his wife, Lucille, and it had made such a production out of the whole Lucille of it all."

Morgan went on to say:

"Having him show up with a wife without telling the story of why and how was always, like, a problem — an issue I had. But, you know, that's what happens when you're doing a show with 30 main characters. You're not able to service each character as well as you may want to. And I think now with 'Dead City,' we'll get some answers."

Only die-hard "The Walking Dead" fans can tell you if those answers have been satisfactory thus far. Hopefully, the writers will figure out a way to resolve Negan's character arc to Morgan's liking by the end of "Dead City" — which, to date, has not been renewed for a third season. It feels like a man as wicked as Negan, who's only partially redeemed himself since his Season 6 introduction, has a skull-shattering date with destiny. This would at least square things with poor Abraham.