“Fear the Walking Dead” will move slowly–like a walker, maybe, though there probably won't be as many of those as there are in the original series. In fact, the first season will cover just three weeks in the characters' lives.
“We purposefully built the show a little more slowly,” showrunner and executive producer Dave Erickson said this afternoon at TCA. “We tried to slow-burn the story to make it as much about the anxiety tension and paranoia that goes with this outbreak” instead of “confrontations with zombies,” he said.
AMC has already ordered a second, 15-episode season of “Fear The Walking Dead” (which the producers said they are referring to as just “Fear”), and the series will not catch up to the start of “The Walking Dead”'s first season.
As a result, don't expect crossovers. “There's no intention of having character references or Easter eggs,” he said, though there will be more exploration of what happened before Rick woke up in season one. “We will see a military presence, and we will get a sense of how first-responders [reacted] when things started to go sideways.”
Still, the characters really know what's happening. “By the end of season one, we definitely know the world has changed,” Erickson told TV critics. “But the central characters, a family, are “still somewhat insulated from the greater truth of what's going on.” The series won't reveal the inception of the zombie apocalypse.
Despite that, don't expect “Fear the Walking Dead” to be boring. Kim Dickens, who plays Madison Clark, promises “a lot of action. … There's so much excitement and action that I would get a little disappointed if I just got a dialogue scene.”
Executive producer and director Adam Davidson said, “There is going to be plenty of encounterings of the walker-type or the infected-type.” And he added that “we're experiencing the fall of Los Angeles, the largest city in the United States, through the eyes of this family. … That's what makes it exciting, and also keeps it emotional and grounded.”