The Walking Dead spinoff doesn’t even air until the end of August, but Fear The Walking Dead has already been picked up for a second season. The first season will consist of only six episodes—the second? 15. That’s a lot of faith that AMC is putting into the franchise.
Deadline reports that the news broke at a TCA panel today where the show’s creative team showed clips of the first season’s third episode and talked about what the show would be like and whether it’d have a Walking Dead crossover (not planned yet, sorry):
The LA-set Fear The Walking Dead centers on a blended and often broken family of school teachers in the early days of what would become the zombie apocalypse. Filmed in the City of Angels and Vancouver, the companion series takes place roughly during the four-week time period that The Walking Dead’s Rick Grimes was unconscious in the hospital. While a backstory of sorts to the first season of the five-season-old blockbuster, AMC boss Charlie Collier on Friday made a point of callingFear TWD a “stand-alone series.”
What this means, of course, is that even if you haven’t actually watched the original show (or read the comics, or played the excellent video game) that you’ll still be able to enjoy the spinoff series. Think about it: soon you’ll be able to participate in conversations about TV without any fear that you have five seasons of stuff to catch up on. Of course, if this show is even half as good as the original, there’s a good chance you’ll take a few days off to watch all five seasons anyway.
The folks over at Slash Film shared a few more details about what the series won’t be doing and how the story of season one will unfold which should allow for a season two that doesn’t automatically feel like a chore:
“By the time we end season one, there’s still a window of time, a window of exploration,” Erickson said. “We have some real estate left. We’ve come to realize things have changed. We structure the season in a way that the characters are still insulated from the truth of what’s going on. Part of season two will be that very thing…
“We’re never going to tell the story from the perspective of someone at the CDC or in the military,” Erickson said. “We’ll see how first responders responded when things went sideways, how they protected their own family. That’s an arc of the first season.”
Don’t you almost wish that at least one episode would tell the story form the perspective of the government or CDC? The first series planted some seeds there via the abandoned military subplot and the Rick team’s stay with Dr. Jenner. Even if Robert Kirkman regrets that, it’d still be interesting to see that play out for a one off episode.
Still it seems that we’ll get plenty of background on the zombie apocalypse when the show finally premieres later this month, on August 23rd.
(Via Deadline / Slash Film)
