There’s never been a technology that has allowed the easy spread of information between people more than the internet. The last bit of advancement that comes close was the printing press in the 14th century, and it doesn’t hold a proverbial candle to the internet. That’s obviously great in a lot of ways, but it also means it’s pretty hard to keep certain secrets — secrets like what goes down in the upcoming seasons of television’s most popular shows.
If you know where to look, you can see all sorts of long distance photos of the Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead sets as filming goes down. And with The Walking Dead trying to keep the truth behind certain character deaths a secret, their cast has gone to extreme lengths to trick the people spying on them and reporting back to the internet.
“There has been a lot of tactics used in filming that have been used on films — monitoring actor movement and trying to do things in secret,” The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman told The Hollywood Reporter. “We’ve employed body doubles in places to make people think that people are in places that they’re not.”
“It’s pretty exciting to try and hide certain things,” he admitted. “This is a big season, so we’re not just protecting things that happen in the first episode; there are things that happen in the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth episode and beyond. We’re trying to maintain that secrecy so when people watch the show, they can have that same experience they have in the comic where you don’t know what’s going to happen and it comes as an exciting surprise as the story moves forward.”
“There is a lot of secrecy surrounding this season and when people watch the episodes, they’ll see why and hopefully appreciate it.”
We’ve heard other stories about the security surrounding The Walking Dead, from the people living in the town where things are filmed getting harassed by police and security to The Walking Dead spoiler sites receiving legal threats from AMC lawyers. When it comes to protecting the public from their own obsessive interest in the show, no one else goes as far as The Walking Dead. And with the show returning this Sunday without the identity of Negan’s victim spoiled for everyone, it seems like they’ve pulled off the impossible: they kept something a secret in the age of the internet.
