We’re inching closer and closer to the final episode of The Walking Dead this season, meaning we’re also closer to the introduction of Negan. That’s bad news for Rick Grimes and crew, but good news for the viewer. We’re apparently in for one hell of an entertaining ride with this villain, not to mention he’s going to stick around for a bit.
But one of the questions we haven’t gotten a real answer for up to this point is how The Walking Dead is going to handle Negan’s style of speech. He’s a got a knack for colorful language, peppered with creative uses of the f-word and other curses. The kind of language you can’t really get away with on AMC — which we’ve seen before.
It would seem that Robert Kirkman, Scott Gimple, and the rest of the creatives on the show will attempt to get just as colorful with their strategy to translate Negan’s comic book form to the small screen, possibly finding a way to skirt around AMC’s broadcast restrictions according to The Hollywood Reporter:
“We recognize there are restrictions as for what we can do on AMC and broadcast lines, but AMC is a very creative network and likes to take risks and try new things…Broadcast isn’t the only outlet for this show. There’s a lot of opportunities with Negan that we’re going to be trying to take full advantage of.”
Added Gimple: “There’s no way he could drop that amount of f-bombs that he does in the comic on TV. There’s simply no way. In some way, it can’t be full on, but as long as we have the full-on version, they will come out and people will be able to watch them. That to me was the most important thing, that the full-on Negan exists and it’s available. What version gets on TV, that’s down to experimentation. Jeffrey’s performance is so amazing that I hope people aren’t hanging on the fact that we aren’t saying the f-word in that moment. Especially if they can watch it later. It comes down to either having it and censoring it out in some way or another or not having it. The one thing nobody wants to do is for it not being there to diminish the experience. So stay tuned. We might just on the internet have a supplementary audio program you can go to.”
The pair also talked a bit about THAT scene from the comics that everybody is itching to see on television, having a little bit of fun with the speculation flying around online:
“The big thing that’s going to happen —whenever it happens, it might be next season — when we have that lineup, if we have that lineup, Negan will beat himself to death,” Gimple says with a laugh. “There is a responsibility whenever we make changes to the story, it’s always in service to tell the spirit of the story as true as we can and sometimes that requires total changes, sometimes some changes and sometimes playing things to the letter. It’s a whole jumble in our heads and we go through a lot of thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about it since season two. Whenever it happens, if it happens, I know people won’t like it, but hopefully for the right reasons.”
The game changer here will be when they just go ahead and kill TWO fan favorite characters with the one scene. I don’t think viewers will be able to stand that, leading to a void where The Walking Dead TV series has to do weird things in order to get viewers back. Crossover with CBS’ new MacGyver? The cast of Sliders reuniting to appear on this version of Earth? Perhaps a musical episode? Maybe they’ll just run an episode with a card that apologizes for all the wrong they’ve done before magically just bringing dead characters back to life…all thanks to the intervention of the crew of the USS Enterprise!
Make it so, Kirkman.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)
