Even though ratings on The Walking Dead continue to sink, AMC refuses to deal a fatal blow to the series. On the contrary, they’re expanding it with movies featuring Andrew Lincoln’s departed Rick Grimes character, and the continuation of spinoff Fear the Walking Dead, which I confess to not having watched since the first episode of season one. With stars fleeing left and right, Danai Gurira being the latest, AMC thinks now is the perfect time to introduce yet another spinoff.
During a quarterly ratings call, AMC’s Josh Sapan revealed that a second spinoff of The Walking Dead is in the works. There aren’t any hard details, but here is what Sapan is willing to spill…
“We’re not at a stage where we’ll be announcing its plans to premiere…But we have hired creative people that have pitched story outlines. We feel very good about the development of that series. We’re not in a position to talk about partnerships in terms of other territories or ancillary windows, other than that there’s a healthy appetite for it and we’ve had a number of conversations with a lot of players in the space.”
A “healthy appetite for it”? From who? Shareholders? Certainly it’s not the fans, who are leaving the series in droves. If they are going to keep The Walking Dead going in this way, it’s going to take a drastic change of direction to make it fresh and interesting. But even that, I suspect, won’t be enough to bring back those who consider this show dead and buried. [Deadline]
