The Walking Dead: World Beyond is a little behind in the timeline

The other day, Entertainment Weekly shared an interview with the Walking Dead franchise's chief content officer Scott M. Gimple in which he discussed the trilogy of feature films that are in development, which will show what happened to Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) after he was flown off of The Walking Dead in a mysterious black helicopter. Now EW has posted more of their interview with Gimple, and this half of their conversation focuses on the upcoming new TV show The Walking Dead: World Beyond.

We've heard that World Beyond will focus on 

the first generation to come-of-age in the apocalypse as we know it. Some will become heroes. Some will become villains. In the end, all of them will be changed forever. Grown-up and cemented in their identities, both good and bad. 

Because of that set-up, I figured the show would be starting out a few years after the current setting of The Walking Dead and focus on characters who were born after the zombie apocalypse began. But that's not the case. Gimple revealed to EW that World Beyond starts off earlier in the timeline than where The Walking Dead currently is.

Technically, it’s a little behind. But not much. Not enough for people to notice. It’s very, very close to being simultaneous, but a little bit back…"

When Rick made his exit from The Walking Dead, I didn't think we'd be learning any more about the helicopter people until the movies. But episodes of Fear the Walking Dead have since informed us that the helicopter belonged to an organization called CRM, and the show even spent time with one of the members. The Walking Dead: World Beyond will allow us to learn even more about CRM.

We’re going to be discovering this very big aspect to the world that we haven’t yet seen. We’ve seen glimpses of it on the shows with the helicopters and with the soldier that we saw, Isabelle on Fear. The movie does obviously touch upon some of that mythology as well as Rick being in one of those helicopters. In some ways, World Beyond, it’s a big story and yet it’s sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Rick’s Hamlet, meaning the show and the movie touch upon some of the same things, but they’re not really that deeply related.

We’ll learn more though about that group, that civilization, the nature of some other civilizations of the world through World Beyond, and that will give some of the background for the world that Rick finds himself in. But the story of World Beyond doesn’t really intersect with the movies other than they share knowledge and interaction with some of these bigger things going on in the world."

While The Walking Dead has taken place between Atlanta, Georgia and the Washington D.C. area and Fear the Walking Dead has traveled from California, through Mexico, into Texas, Gimple revealed that World Beyond is set in Nebraska… and also acknowledged that we may be seeing crossovers between World Beyond and the other two shows at some point.

Gimple said there are a lot of things that make World Beyond different from the other shows. 

The first one is really the situation with which the characters have been living in, relatively, a first world situation. Relatively. Because it’s focusing on young people, even the “adults” in this are on the younger side, they’ve more or less grown up with this. There’s a certain everydayness of this to them, though they’ve been behind walls. It’s a very big deal for these characters to leave these walls. Even though they aren’t like, “Oh, what are these people?” They aren’t shocked upon seeing walkers, but it’s just they haven’t been interacting with them. They haven’t had to interact with them. It’s an incredible act of bravery for some of these people to potentially step out into the world."

The Walking Dead: World Beyond stars Alexa Mansour, Nicolas Cantu, Hal Cumpston, Aliyah Royale, Annet Mahendru, Nico Tortorella, and Joe Holt, with Julia Ormond on board to play Elizabeth, "a charismatic leader of a large, sophisticated and formidable force". Images show that Elizabeth wears outfits that have the symbol of CRM on them.

The show's pilot episode was directed by KONG: SKULL ISLAND's Jordan Vogt-Roberts.

AMC hasn't announced a premiere date yet, but The Walking Dead: World Beyond is expected to begin airing sometime in the spring of 2020.