Robert Kirkman Gives New Update on THE WALKING DEAD Spin-Off, Calls It "Startlingly Different"
Love it or hate it, The Walking Dead is one of the most popular shows in television history. So it was pretty big news when comic book creator and executive producer Robert Kirkman announced he was teaming with AMC to bring us a spin-off show set in the same universe. We don't know too much about the new show thus far, other than that it will take place in Los Angeles instead of Atlanta, but Entertainment Weekly caught up with Kirkman and got him to spill some more details about the show.
“I will say that this is going to be a show about family. But it’s going to be a show about a different type of family that we haven’t explored in The Walking Dead thus far. So what we’re trying to do with The Walking Dead spinoff is keep the story as familiar as possible for people that love The Walking Dead, so you’ll get the kind of things that you expect from a Walking Dead story. But, at the same time, we’ll want to tell these stories in a completely different way with completely different people in a completely different setting that’s going to make for a fundamentally different show. I think the look and feel of The Walking Dead spinoff is going to be startlingly different.”
Kirkman and his team want to make sure that viewers don't have to have any prior knowledge of The Walking Dead to enjoy this show, and no characters from the original show will appear in the spin-off (at least for now).
“We want it to be a new show that can stand on its own. You could watch The Walking Dead spinoff if you’ve never watched an episode of The Walking Dead and get a really great, rich, fulfilling experience out of it. It has to be a show that can stand on its own. I think that’s what we’ve accomplished, and we start filming in a couple of days. I’m really excited.”
"It’s Los Angeles. It’s a corner of the world that we have never explored in the comic book series. So, theoretically, something like this could be happening in Los Angeles in the comic book series, but we don’t show you this area of the country in the comic book series. So it fits within that world, but it is all new characters, all new events and all kinds of crazy stuff.”
It sounds like this might be a show that people could tune into if The Walking Dead just isn't their cup of tea. I watched the first season of the show and had to tune out because I thought it was far too slow: not enough was happening, and none of the characters were interesting enough for me to really care about. (In fact, most of them were incredibly annoying.) But I've heard the show got much better after that, and its increasing popularity seems to endorse that claim.
What do you guys think? Are you excited about the spin-off? Let us know below.