With the announcement of a final expanded season for the flagship series of The Walking Dead, Alasdair Stuart examines the state of the TWD universe…

The Walking Dead is one of the first comic adaptations of this generation to become a crossover success. Its ten season run has deviated from the comics massively and undergone a couple of major thematic changes but kept the core idea absolutely in place, sometimes to its detriment. The early seasons were essentially the wandering misery tour of the early days of the comic and that turned a lot of people off. It’s easy to see why too, and the show has frequently been criticized for ‘WHO DIES NEXT?!’ misery porn endings and the never ending drudge of the world. At times, it’s done just that. At others it’s been The Archers with added undead. But more and more it’s become something else. A richly complex, nuanced story about personal responsibility and what it means to be alive, to be a good person, after the end of the world. It’s those qualities that look set to continue too, even as the core show has now been given an end date. A 24 episode season 11 will conclude the show in 2022, but it will be accompanied and replaced by an absolute flotilla of spinoffs. Here’s a brief rundown of them and why the show still matters

 

Fear The Walking Dead

The original spinoff has undergone a near total retooling in the last few years, changing from the misadventures of a peculiarly luckless family to the story of a new family forged by catastrophe. The current cast is anchored by Lennie James as Morgan, a character first introduced in the very earliest days of the original show and is peppered with remarkable acting talent. Jenna Elfman, Colman Domingo, Rubén Blades, Maggie Grace and Garret Dillahunt are especially great as a former scientist, a former con man, a former torturer, a journalist and a sharpshooter respectively who all bring unique issues, and unique skills, into play. The show currently focuses on the idea of rebuilding society with a particular attention paid to personal stories and it’s intimate and gentle stuff, with added zombies obviously. Recently bulked out by the addition of Austin Amelio bringing his excellent portrayal of Dwight over from the core show, Fear looks poised to become the center of the TWDverse following the core show’s finale. It’s also interesting to note it’s the one show that, by and large, has remained sequential. While TWD has jumped a few years into the future, FTWD, for the most part, continues to take the long way round.

 

The Rick Grimes Movies

Andrew Lincoln’s iconic lawman held the show together for close to a decade and his journey from  the darkness to the light (And back, more than once. Rick had a LOT of feelings) was the emotional core of the show right up to his departure.  As far as the other characters are concerned, he died saving their communities from a massive herd of walkers. In truth, he was whisked away by a mysterious helicopter, seen several times across that season. Seen too, more recently in Fear The Walking Dead… The Civil Republic Military (CRM) as they’re called have been established to work from several bases within the US and Rick seems to have been taken to one of them and kept there for a considerable time. Information differs on whether we’re getting one Rick movie or three, but something is definitely coming down the line for TWD’s original protagonist whether on the small or big screen.

 

The World Beyond

The newest spinoff is arguably the most interesting. It follows a group of teenagers inside a CRM town and is set ten years after the initial outbreak. It focuses on the first generation to grow up in ‘the new world’ and how it changes them, something both TWD and FTWD have been playing with for a while now. So, with FTWD in the ‘past’ and TWD’s time period being the default ‘present’ for the franchise, this is the future, and the future is looking pretty interesting.

For a start, this is a two-season ‘event’ series. There’s no limitless run here, just a finite story told in the space it needs. Given the justified criticism of the show’s early days running in place, this bodes very well. A definitive end point, more information about the CRM and a fun central cast mean this is definitely one to look forward to when it arrives later this year.

 

Carol & Daryl

The spinoff everyone was secretly hoping for has arrived! She’s incredibly good at death! He’s incredibly good at death! They may or may not be in love! Melissa McBride & Norman Reedus will step directly over to this once the core show finishes, suggesting that they at least survive the finale. While we don’t have the premise yet, the sheer force of personality onscreen means this is going to be one to look out for. It’s also the show most likely to take the original TWD timeline into the future. Whether or not other characters will survive to guest star is something we don’t know. Yet.

 

Tales of The Walking Dead

This is where things get REALLY interesting. Here’s how the show is described: “an episodic anthology with individual episodes or arcs of episodes focused on new or existing characters, backstories or other stand-alone experiences.”

This means everyone’s in play, living or dead. Given the franchise’s ridiculously deep talent bench that means everyone from Samantha Morton to David Morrissey to Michael Rooker to Stephen Yeun could and odds are will return. It’s a great idea, playing off the fan service of exploring the show’s run with new stories and in doing so securing dubious fans with the promise of one last go round for their favorites.

 

Four shows, one set of movies and all of them built into a unified framework. It’s remarkable to think the show has come so far, and even more remarkable to see it build on the sort of fictional model that the MCU pioneered. The world may have ended, but The Walking Dead’s work looks to be only just beginning.