It’s time I had a DTR with The Walking Dead…

… because this is starting to feel too much like LOST.

The worst breakup I’ve ever been through was in 2010. It was the end of my relationship with LOST. After six years of loving commitment to that show, I found myself watching the end credits and feeling despair. “But you promised it wouldn’t end like this!” I thought to myself. How could I be so naive?! I felt like had wasted the best years of my life on something that was doomed to fail from the start, seduced by the mystery and intrigue of it all.

I thought all of that was behind me… I had moved on… until last night, when the end credits rolled on The Walking Dead. As with LOST, I’ve spent six years loving this show (and the graphic novels) and defending myself to people who don’t get it. But last night, I felt cheated… and suddenly, I remembered LOST.

And I wasn’t alone in that remembrance. On The Talking Dead, creator Robert Kirkman explained that he, too, saw a comparison to LOST; only, he used this as a defense of The Walking Dead’s own cliffhanger ending…

“I would say, when they opened up the hatch [on LOST], we had to wait and see who was in the hatch. I liked thinking about that. I liked talking about it. … We have to do an episode that justifies it to you.”

But for LOST, that cliffhanger — when the Oceanic survivors open “the hatch” but we don’t get to see what is inside — was a matter of buying time, both literally and figuratively.

“The Hatch” cliffhanger happened at the end of season one of a new show that was still courting viewers, advertisers and renewals. I’m not in TV production, but I imagine that creating suspense and giving people a reason to tune-in for season two was mission critical if it was going to keep going. The Walking Dead, on the other hand, is an established series with record viewership.

And unlike The Walking Dead team, the writers of LOST have admitted they had no idea where that story was going (and this continued thru the series finale). I can see the appeal of a season cliffhanger in that case, because it meant they had more time to craft a story. This isn’t the case with The Walking Dead. The story is already out there in the comic series, unless Kirkman and team are planning a major departure from it (and the introduction of this storyline doesn’t point to that).

What the cliffhanger gave me was this: a moment to reflect on my obsession with a television show that may continue to let me down. Maybe instead of blocking off my Sunday nights to watch The Walking Dead, I should spend that time with friends in the real world, not those in the fictional town of Alexandria. Perhaps this was the moment I needed to be reminded that I don’t need to subject myself to this emotional turmoil — that I deserve better than what television producers are offering me….

Or maybe I should just catch-up on Game of Thrones…