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walking-dead-spinoff.jpg

AMC Is Ending 'The Walking Dead'; Long Live 'The Walking Dead'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 9, 2020 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | September 9, 2020 |


walking-dead-spinoff.jpg

Uproxx is my The Walking Dead home, and I’ve already written this up over there, but it’s such huge news for a certain segment of television viewers that I wanted to mention it over here, too.

The Walking Dead is coming to an end.

Oh stop your applause, and I heard that, reader: Yes, The Walking Dead is still on! It will be on for a good while longer, too. The series expanded its tenth season by six episodes (one episode of which will air next month and the other five of which will air in the Spring). In the meantime, the 11th season has also been expanded into 24 episodes that will air over the course of two years, meaning that The Walking Dead will continue to air until late 2022.

After that? The Walking Dead will basically continue on in another way: Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) and Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride) will be spun-off into their own show, and it will be run by the same wonderful showrunner that currently runs The Walking Dead, Angela Kang. I suspect the Carol and Daryl (and Dog) series will just be a reset, of sorts, for the series after it exhausts Robert Kirkman’s original source material (the comic book, which wrapped up last year, has only one arc that the series hasn’t gotten to yet). I also suspect that the end will dovetail narratively with the end of the other limited series, the two-season spin-off, The World Beyond, and that this “phase” of The Walking Dead will conclude with the Rick Grimes movie and/or movies.

Meanwhile, because the TWD universe is not going anywhere anytime soon, Scott Gimple — the current architect of The Walking Dead universe — will also launch a The Walking Dead anthology series with individual episodes or arcs of episodes focused on new or existing characters, backstories, or other stand-alone experiences. This might be, for instance, where we get our Negan prequel.

No word yet on the fate of Fear the Walking Dead. Still, even as TWD continues in other ways, late 2022 will be something of an end of an era for one of the longest-running and the highest-rated dramas in cable history. By announcing an end date, The Walking Dead will also create a better sense of immediacy, and maybe even bring back some viewers who might want to see how it all wraps up.



Header Image Source: AMC