‘The Walking Dead’ season 4: AMC addresses spin-off, still in early stages
When are we going to see “The Walking Dead” spin-off actually end up on the air? At the moment, the simple answer is “at some point in 2015.” This is not a series that is going to be on TV soon; it wasn’t on the roster of new programming for AMC at TCA this weekend, and the show is still even figuring out just what it should be or where it should be set.
Speaking at this panel, AMC’s programming chief Joel Stillerman offered up a generic sort of progress report, and compared the status of the spin-off to “Better Call Saul,” which is going to premiere in November and already has many components now in place:
“That show is not as far along (as ‘Better Call Saul’). Robert has some things on his plate. He continues to write every issue of the comic and hasn’t finished season four of The Walking Dead, which he is very intimately involved with and will continue to be. That’s really in the incubation stages. The one thing that I’ll share is just an anecdote that Robert shared with us. He has such a specific vision that he laid out really clearly in the first issue of the comic book. And I encourage anybody who’s interested in the show to go read the note that he wrote in the first issue of the comic. His motivation for telling that story was so clear and so powerful, and it served as such a great north star for the show. We kicked around a few ideas, but primarily what he’s working on is, what is the idea that gives [him] as clear a mandate to make another version of this show as [he] had for the first one? What is going on [at the moment] is a more philosophical discussion over why there should be another version of the show. Once we answer that, we’ll zero in on the specific creative.”
We are personally pretty stoked that these discussions revolving around the important question of “why” are happening in the first place. That shows that AMC is thinking about more than just dollar signs, and care about what sort of updates and components should be in place here that makes the spin-off different than the franchise show.
What do you think about some of this talk? Are you cool with waiting for a while for this “Walking Dead” spin-off coming on the air?