AMC Sets End Date For The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead is credited with launching a zombie craze in popular culture throughout the 2010s, and was the most popular show on cable for several years. Even though the show isn’t as fresh as it used to be, AMC still considers it the star brand of the network, and has boasted as recently as last year that they could see it going on forever. Apparently they changed their minds (or the people who thought so were fired)…an end date was just announced for the post-apocalyptic series.
Due to an actual civilization-altering event, it’s been an unusual season for The Walking Dead…everything in Season 10 was edited and done with up to the final episode. That single episode turned out to be impossible to complete under lockdown, and had to be delayed until next month, when it will air as a “special” October 4. Also, it’s not really the end of Season 10 anymore.
AMC has tacked an additional six episodes to the order for season 10, and though it’s not clear why, those episodes will air in early 2021. After that, we’ll get one long final season, Season 11…and we mean long; it will be 24 episodes wide and won’t finish until late 2022.
That’ll be the end of The Walking Dead proper, but probably not the end of the brand on AMC. More than one spinoff exists, and they just announced two more. Angela Kang, the current showrunner of TWD, is working on a spinoff series focused around Carol and Daryl (so it’s a given now that these two survive, unless this is a prequel). That show will begin airing in 2023, replacing The Walking Dead.
The other show is called Tales of the Walking Dead and it will be an anthology series — sometimes focusing on new characters, sometimes on familiar ones. Longtime TWD veteran Scott M. Gimple is heading this one.
Plus you’ve got Fear The Walking Dead, Walking Dead: World Beyond (limited to two seasons) and the solo movies starring Rick in the works. In short, zombies and the squabbling humans who deal with them are not going anywhere on AMC.