Abstract
AMC s The Walking Dead (TWD) has maintained a dedicated viewership since its premiere in 2010 and serves as a well-known example of zombie media in today’s culture. The zombie genre has long been recognized for its subversive potential, but is often critiqued for failing to subvert certain institutions, such as the heterosexual, nuclear family. TWD has been critiqued in previous scholarship for sharing this failure. However, analysis of more recent seasons of TWD shows that the show has steadily increased its representation of different family types, and this increase of non-heterosexual, non-nuclear families reflects a change in American families themselves. Over time, the nuclear family has decreased in frequency in America with a corresponding increase in other family types, such as blended, LGBTQ+, single-parent, biracial, and more. This article analyzes the families present in TWD during the first half of its tenth season and concludes that though the show has improv