New Walking Dead spinoff set to walk the earth in 2020

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

The Walking Dead television franchise is going mostly strong on AMC with the flagship series, THE WALKING DEAD, finishing up its ninth season and the first spinoff, FEAR THE WALKING DEAD, set to start the fifth season in June. While that’s a good amount of TV for fans of the DEAD, network AMC isn’t going to let its bread and butter get stale and have thus revealed details for yet another bloody spinoff set to hit airwaves next year.

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Announced during the AMC Networks Summing in Manhattan (via Deadline), the series has been given a ten-episode order with production to begin this summer. Co-created by TWD’s chief content officer Scott M. Gimple and run by TWD writer/producer Matt Negrete, the untitled series is said to focus on two young female protagonists who represent “the first generation to come-of-age in the apocalypse as we know it.”

David Madden, president of programming for AMC Networks and AMC Studios issued a statement about the show, saying, “We’re thrilled that the Dead will keep walking into a new corner of the post-apocalyptic world, a corner that will present stories and characters unlike any that The Walking Dead has dramatized thus far, and that is bound to excite one of the most passionate fanbases in television.”

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This new series will come at a time when ratings for the two series have been starting to fall compared to recent seasons, albeit only slightly as the main series remains the number one show on cable and the number two drama behind THIS IS US. As well, the main series has lost its leading stars Andrew Lincoln and Lauren Cohan as they've moved on to other projects. The network wanting to keep the franchise alive and expanding is not a surprise, as the other shows are also some of the most expensive to advertise on TV, with ad packages costing over $400,000 (per Variety). The two shows combined made $240 million in ad revenue in 2018, although that’s down from $260 million in 2017.

But on the creative side, it’s all about the universe and stories within it, and Gimple expressed his excitement about working on the new project in his statement.

“Showing audiences an unseen corner of The Walking Dead Universe steeped in a new mythology is a very cool way to celebrate a ‘Decade of the Dead’ on TV and over fifteen years of Robert Kirkman’s brilliant comic. Matt Negrete is one of the best writer-producers in TWD’s long history — I’m thrilled to be working beside him to tell stories unlike we’ve seen before, taking our first step into an even larger world.”

The focus on a story set around the children of the zombie apocalypse is interesting, I can’t say I’m as excited about this as some other DEAD fans will be. The main show hasn’t quite gripped me as it has in the past, and FTWD has done little to make up for that. Perhaps a new series with – ahem – new blood is exactly what the franchise needs for a little pick-me-up.