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... but if someone gets shot or bitten or suddenly werewolf'd "outta nowhere," and you latch onto that as your primary way of getting rid of side characters, then pretty soon, those side characters go from being potentially meaningful parts of the story to "outta nowhere" fodder. Penny Dreadful had a few main characters and a bunch of death scene prequels.

I hate to rag on The Walking Dead so much, because deep down, there are aspects of the show that I really enjoy. Usually those parts involve crossbows and arms getting torn off, and luckily, The Walking Dead is fully stocked with them. And I know that real-life deaths are frequently sudden, despite the fact that we all dream about giving a 30-minute address about the state of good and evil to a room full of everyone we've ever loved before we kick it. But while someone suddenly getting hit in the face by a bullet was a great "OH SHIT" moment in Season 3, doing it four years later and expecting our oh-shittedness to remain at full capacity is only tedious.

AMC

Five dudes. Combined amount of time taken to kill each of them off: about four seconds.

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I'd honestly give more of them a pass if they were jump scares, as jump scares done right are thrilling. But "outta nowhere" deaths lack the framing and build-up of a jump scare. You get no jolt out of it. It's just hasty dying, and the vast number of these in a relatively short amount of time has made it impossible to connect with any characters. And why would you want to? They're just going to be in the middle of a sentence, get bitten, and then never mentioned again. It's like asking someone to enjoy a sandwich, but as soon as they get a taste of it, you pull it out of their hands and then insult them for trying to enjoy a sandwich. The Walking Dead is a bunch of stolen sandwiches. Five stolen sandwiches out of ten.