‘The Walking Dead’ alum Michael Cudlitz gets a new gig — why you should be excited
Obviously, let’s plant a big ol’ SPOILER ALERT before we get any further into this article: There are going to be some details in here that you probably don’t want to know if you’re behind a season or two on “The Walking Dead.”
Still with us? Good! Let us move forward…
Ever since Negan bashed Abraham Ford senseless (as in, dead) with a baseball bat, we haven’t seen much of Michael Cudlitz on TV. To be fair, it’s been tough. AMC probably didn’t want him booking a number of public gigs in the weeks that followed him filming his death scene — they invested countless amounts of money in having the death of Abraham and Glenn be a surprise, so it wouldn’t make sense of there were some headlines out there blaring that MICHAEL CUDLITZ GETS NEW TV GIG — WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR HIS FUTURE ON THE WALKING DEAD?
Also, it made sense for Cudlitz to wait until pilot season to get a series-regular gig on another show, and now he has one … potentially, as in we still gotta see if ABC loves it enough to order it.
Michael has been booked to star in “The Trustee,” an hour-long buddy-cop comedy that is being produced by “Smurfs” writers Jay Scherick and David Ronn. Elizabeth Banks is also serving as an executive-producer on the project, just in case you wanted to get even more hype around the episode. This series stars Meghan Rath as Eliza Radley, a very efficient (albeit stubborn) cop who ends up getting some help from the trustee at the precinct — a felon who’s living out the rest of their sentence doing work for the police department. Think a small-scale version of Neal Caffrey for most of “White Collar.”
When we first heard the premise, we thought that Cudlitz was going to be playing the convict; instead, he’s a dry police captain named Timothy Waits … or as we want to call him already, Timothy Waits for No Nonsense. Playing cop characters is nothing foreign for Michael, given that he was one on “Southland” for many years when that was on the air.
This series feels somewhat in the vein of a “Monk,” a “Castle,” or a “Psych” in terms of tone — in other words, it’s right up our alley and we’ll probably love it in the event that it gets picked up.
Now is a good time to be related to “The Walking Dead” in some way — remember for a minute here that Sonequa Martin-Green is going to be the star of “Star Trek: Discovery.” There’s no word on her “Walking Dead” future, so STOP WRITING THOSE ALL CAPS HEADLINES NOW. (We figure if we write it like that, maybe it’ll convince a few people to cool their jets.)
Like the casting, and the idea of the show? Share some of your thoughts on the subject in the comments! (Photo: AMC.)