Is ‘The Walking Dead’ season 7 acting too much like it has 22 episodes?

We’ve made it now through several episodes of “The Walking Dead” season 7, and we’d say that for the most part, the show continues to be extremely entertaining.

However, at the same exact time we’re starting to see some issues that are coming from the show’s extremely-large cast and nonlinear storytelling: We’re really not moving forward very much in terms of time. Sunday night’s “Swear” ended at least a small stretch of time past some other recent episodes, but not so much that the landscape at Alexandria had really changed at all. The same can be said for every other story we’ve seen. Last week we spent almost the entire hour either at The Kingdom or heading in that direction; meanwhile, we’ve spent an extended episode over at The Kingdom and a long stretch of time watching Daryl Dixon suffer with “Easy Street” in the background.

The truth of the matter, at least from our point of view, is “The Walking Dead” is still a very good show, and all of its episodes individually are great. Unfortunately, it’s starting to feel right now like “Lost” in the middle of one of its longer seasons, where it feels like it has the luxury of doing 22 stories a year so it can bounce around and spend some time with each character. Unfortunately, it doesn’t; it only has 16, and we feel like one of the real reasons the show’s losing a lot of live viewership so far this season is because there’s no real reason for anyone to make this into appointment viewing when you’re going so granular with much of your storytelling. You don’t want your show to move at a zombie’s pace.

Unfortunately, here is the crossroads for your show: How do you try to serve so many different purposes at one time? “Swear” was a very good episode, and other than last week’s roller-skating nonsense, we do think that many of the season 7 episodes have been very good. They’re just coming at the expense of forward motion, and there probably isn’t enough hours in the day with this show’s production schedule to take on more than 16 episodes a season. It almost feels like we’ve got to see the writers commit to one thing or another, whether it be giving us a smaller cast and more personal stories focusing only on them, or cutting out some personal stories in favor of bigger action set pieces that push the story forward. Or, maybe you splice multiple stories in an episode similar to “Game of Thrones.”

Ultimately, we feel like you could’ve told these first four episodes’ worth of content within four, and if you did continue to keep them this spread out, why not find some other ways to let us know where the story is going?

Who do you think: Is “The Walking Dead” taking too long in your mind to get from point A to point B? Share below, and head over here for some more news on the show, including our most-recent episode review right now. (Photo: AMC.)