Finally Robert Kirkman has given us some details on The Walking Dead’s spin off show, Fear the Walking Dead. Little has been known up to this point aside from the cast and the fact that it will be set in Los Angeles.
While talking to EW, Kirkman revealed that the characters are part of a blended family, which includes a widowed teacher Madison (Kim Dickens), her high school stand-out daughter Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) and her college dropout son Nick (Frank Dillane) on one side of the family. While divorced fellow teacher Travis (Cliff Curtis) and his son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie) make up the other half of this “family”.
Kirkman tells EW, “At its core this is a story of Travis and Madison, who are these two schoolteachers that both have kids from previous marriages and are very much in love. This is a show about two people who are a team, and they do back each other up. The do love and respect each other. They’re a happy couple, which is something that you don’t see a lot of on cable television these days. Usually cable television focuses on infidelity, love triangles, divorces, marriages breaking down–that’s really the meat and potatoes of the drama we mostly deal with on TV. So having this interesting couple at the core of this show, fighting against the backdrop of civilization crumbling and the zombie apocalypse, really is the core of things. They’ve got two sets of kids. It’s an interesting situation.” When asked just how long Travis and Madison have been together, Kirkman replies, “They are dating and working very quickly toward marriage.”
Kirkman also explains the timeline in relation to The Walking Dead as he says “Watching the world crumble around them, and people are very much unprepared for this world that they’re having to very quickly adapt.”
Where in the Walking Dead we see Rick waking up to an already full on zombie apocalypse, in Fear the Walking Dead, we sort of get to watch civilization crumble and watch how people transition into this new way of living. It seems the outbreak is on the news in isolated incidents, and as all this is happening, most people are just going about their daily lives, not really noticing what is really happening. What really hits home about this is, if it were to happen it would probably happen this way.
Fear the Walking Dead premieres this summer which The Walking Dead returns in October on AMC.
