Yet another The Walking Dead spin-off is here and it delivers exactly what everyone has come to expect: the same old same old without a smidgen of originality

Clémence Poésy and Louis Puech Scigliuzzi in Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. Photo: AMC

Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon in the latest Walking Dead franchise offering. Photo: AMC

Clémence Poésy and Louis Puech Scigliuzzi in Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. Photo: AMC

Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon in the latest Walking Dead franchise offering. Photo: AMC

In the final two years of his life, the reclusive Howard Hughes is said to have watched the 1968 film Ice Station Zebra more than 150 times.

If you’ve watched Ice Station Zebra, a crushingly dull submarine-set Cold War thriller that drags on for two-and-a-half hours, even once, you’ll know this was not the behaviour you’d expect from someone in a healthy state of mind.

By that stage poor Howard, who lived in hotel rooms, refused to bathe, spent most of his time naked and had let his fingernails grow as long as Count Orlok’s in Nosferatu, was afflicted by a range of phobias that had driven him as mad as a bag of laboratory rats. In other words, there was a reason for his eccentric behaviour.

But what excuse do fans of The Walking Dead have? They too have been watching the same thing over and over again — and for even more years than Howard Hughes.

The original Walking Dead ran for 11 seasons, finally coming to an end in 2022. On top of that there’s been a stream of spin-offs, all of which are basically the same as the original, that shows no sign of ever coming to an end.

The latest to lurch into view is The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (Sky Max, Thursday, August 1, 9pm). Technically, this is the sixth spin-off, since it was made before The Walking Dead: Those Who Live and shown on AMC in the US last year.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether it’s the sixth, the seventh or the eighth (which is already in the pipeline). Franchise fans for whom the gruff, crossbow-wielding Daryl Dixon, played by Norman Reedus, has become a favourite character will love it. It delivers exactly what everyone has come to expect: the same old same old without a smidgen of originality.

Clémence Poésy and Louis Puech Scigliuzzi in Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. Photo: AMC

The only thing different is the location. For reasons that aren’t fully revealed in the first of the six episodes, Daryl washes ashore in France.

Trudging through the ruins of civilisation and picking his way around the rotting carcasses of zombies, our bedraggled, battle-scarred hero finds a few useful things, including a mini-tape recorder that once belonged to an Irish family (the father recorded a final message on it), a map and a fishing spear.

In time-honoured tradition, Daryl, despite being an experienced hunter and zombie-killer, casually wanders into a dimly-lit building and is immediately assailed by a pack of them — a new strain that appears to drool and bleed acid.

In a series called The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, you know the titular character is not going to come to any real harm, so there’s absolutely no suspense, no sense of jeopardy, no feeling that anything is at stake in the encounter

In a series called The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, you know the titular character is not going to come to any real harm, so there’s absolutely no suspense, no sense of jeopardy, no feeling that

Daryl just hacks, stabs and spears his way through the lot of them — although he does sustain a nasty bite on the arm. Next, he happens upon a young woman and an old man, who agree to give him some food in return for medical supplies.

When thugs belonging to a militia group turn up, Daryl dispatches them, only to be double-crossed by the girl and the old man, who was faking being blind and whacks Daryl on the head.

The girl is about to kill Daryl with his own fishing spear — there’s gratitude for you! — when he’s saved by a gun-toting nun called Isabelle (Clémence Poésy). Isabelle is the leader of an order-cum-resistance group, who are based in a convent that’s well-stocked with weapons, both medieval and modern.

After Isabelle nurses Daryl back to health, she tells him they’ve been expecting him. His arrival, she says, was foretold. God has sent him to protect a boy under her care named Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi).

The nuns believe Laurent is the new Messiah, who will “lead the revival of humanity”, and they want Daryl to escort him to a safe house in northern France. Any of this sound familiar? It should.

The brilliant first season of The Last of Us took the same basic ingredients — an apocalypse, zombies, a taciturn loner with a heart of gold who becomes protector to a special child who holds the key to saving the world — and used them to make something fresh, thrilling and emotionally involving.

This, on the other hand, is content to just lazily go through the motions, repeatedly recycling the same story.

What would it take for the plug to be pulled? Probably nothing less than the real world suddenly being overrun by real zombies. Hopefully, they’ll eat AMC executives first.