With The Walking Dead being the most popular show on television right now, spin-off Fear The Walking Dead has had some pretty big shoes to fill. And now with the show off on hiatus halfway through season two, executive producer Dave Erickson is opening up about how hard it is to balance the purity of the story he’s trying to tell with the expectations of fans who have already traveled through six walker-infested seasons of The Walking Dead.
On The Walking Dead “everybody knows the score and is able to kill without any thought,” Erickson said in an interview with TVLine. “They become very practiced at it very quickly. And that was something we wanted to avoid. We wanted to [instead] try to balance expectations of how people should behave once they know there are zombies with this sort of attempted slow burn into the apocalypse from a character standpoint.”
“That creates frustrations to a certain degree, because in some instances you want [the characters] to get it already. And in some circumstances, the things that they do that don’t seem particularly zombie-savvy are, for me, moments where they aren’t zombie-savvy.”
While it’s doubtful the shows will ever link up, The Walking Dead and Fear The Walking Dead both exist in the same universe. According to Erickson, Fear The Walking Dead has just about caught up with the start of The Walking Dead.
“I think right now, by the end of the first half [of season two], we’re getting very close to Rick waking up in Georgia. … They’ve arrived at a place where they’re up to speed on how one deals with the apocalypse and the dead.”
That’s good news, both for the characters on the show and the viewers at home. Knowing the ropes should save the Manawas and the Clarks from being devoured by the ever-increasing zombie threat, and will hopefully lead to more exciting and compelling zombie TV for those of us who have stuck with them through their learning process.
