https://www.forbes.com/sites/insert...d-walking-dead-series-is-coming/#552c7daf6f87
AMC Confirms A Third 'Walking Dead' Series Is Coming
Paul Tassi
Senior Contributor
Games News and opinion about video games, technology and the internet
The Walking Dead
AMC’s expansion plan for
The Walking Dead includes indefinite seasons of the main show, new movies with big-name cast members like Andrew Lincoln and continued crossovers between the main show and its spin-off,
Fear the Walking Dead. But now we’re starting to hear more about how
Fear will not be the only spin-off for long, something that has felt obvious for a while, but now AMC is starting to talk more about it openly.
In a Q4 call (via
The Wrap), Ed Carroll, AMC’s chief operating officer, had this to say about a third series in the works:
That is in active development. We’re not yet at a stage where we’ll be announcing its plans to premiere. But we have hired creative people that have pitched story outlines. We feel very good about the development of that series.
A third
Walking Dead series, joining the other two which currently run 16 weeks a year, means that if rotated correctly, AMC could go 48 weeks out of 52 per year with some sort of
Walking Dead show airing on Sunday nights. I
have previously argued that with dropping ratings and a splintering cast, that tripling down on
The Walking Dead seems like an odd move. But AMC’s position is that
The Walking Dead is still very strong, despite declines, beating all other cable shows on Sundays and holding its own with the networks as well (though it did used to beat them handily). And then there’s the additional fact that
Fear the Walking Dead and
The Walking Dead are AMC’s two highest rated programs by a fairly substantial margin. Despite having a lot of prestige programming, none of it puts up the numbers of these series. So why not keep going?
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
I have heard very old rumors about a third
Walking Dead series that was possibly going to be set in another country to expand the world to a place we haven’t seen before, and possibly to help draw more of an international audience. More recent rumors have suggested that Lauren Cohan, Maggie, was maybe going to be offered her own spin-off series, but if her new show
Whiskey Cavalier takes off, and it seems poised to, that seems very unlikely.
I’m not so sure about the foreign country idea these days because AMC has made it abundantly clear they want to connect their universe together, and that’s hard when you set a show overseas in an era without air travel.
Fear the Walking Dead has siphoned off Morgan from the main show, and now Dwight in this upcoming season. Fans never saw their beloved “Madison and Alicia are Alpha and Lydia” super crossover theory they were hoping for, but it stands to reason that a third series should at least be able to connect to the other two shows in some way, even if it takes some time like it did with
Fear.
I find myself wondering about the fate of
Fear itself. Last season, Morgan made a big deal about getting the group to Alexandria, but they ultimately decided to stay put and open up a “help people” factory. It has always seemed like the eventual plan of
Fear was to merge with
The Walking Dead, ending the series that way, but it’s hard to know if that’s still in the cards or not. Three
Walking Dead shows airing in one year for 95% of that year does seem like overkill, so maybe
Fear is going to wind down as this other show winds up.
I am curious if AMC might be planning this as a “true” spin-off of the main show, unlike what they did with
Fear. Even if Maggie isn’t the chosen one, could AMC give a show to one of the other current cast members? A while back I would have said Daryl could have had his own solo spin-off, but now with Rick gone, he’s clearly needed on TWD proper. I personally would watch a spin-off about the new arrivals to the Hilltop, Magda’s group, but they just got here. There aren’t many candidates but if I had to pick just one, it would probably be Negan, who either escapes or is exiled and is forced to find his own way and re-write his story as a hero instead of a villain this time. I’d watch that, though judging by the comics, he still has a role to play in the main story for a while yet.
We’ll see what develops from this, and I’d expect some word on what’s to come in the next few months here.
Show is pure garbage now, damn soap opera. She fucking one dude, gets pregnant, hooks up with the pastor, wants him to accept it and then some creepy peeping Tom comes over talking about even though I can’t hve her I wanna see her happy..smh
