The Walking Dead Spinoff Adds This Oscar-Winning Director
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AMC’s The Walking Dead may be massively popular, and has actually started to live up to it’s potential over the last ten episodes, finally. Still, you don’t normally associate it with tons of prestigious awards. But that’s about to change to a degree, as the upcoming spinoff will feature an Academy Award-winning director classing up the joint.
Deadline reports that Adam Davidson, who won an Oscar all the way back in 1991 for his short film The Lunch Date, which also wrote, will helm the pilot episode of the companion series. He doesn’t just bring the clout of that recognizable gold statue, which I imagine he just carries around with him at all times (I would), he also has a wealth of experience working in TV. He has directed episodes of Fringe, Lost, Community, and dozens of others. This won’t be his first time with AMC either, as he’s helmed the likes of Hell on Wheels, Low Winter Sun, and TURN for the network.
Scheduled to go into production sometime later this year, The Walking Dead spinoff was created by Robert Kirkman, who created the comics the series is based on, and Dave Erickson, who will also serve as the showrunner. The series will be set in the same world as the central show, though in a different place and will most likely work on a different timeline. Aside from that, the only details we have came in the form of a casting breakdown that came down a while back. Check it out:
SEAN CABRERA | A Latino male in his early 40s, Sean is a good man trying to do right by everyone in his life.
CODY CABRERA | Sean’s whip-smart and rebellious teenage son. Known as the angriest kid in town.
NANCY TOMPKINS | A thirtysomething single mom to two kids, Nancy looks like the girl next door, but there’s an edge to her.
NICK TOMPKINS | Nancy’s screwed up teenage son. He’s too old to stay home, too scared to flee.
ASHLEY TOMPKINS | Nancy’s mostly level-headed teenage daughter. Her ambition is in direct proportion to her older brother’s failures. She loves her mom but it’s time to get out of Dodge.
ANDREA CHAPMAN | A somewhat wilted flower child, fortysomething Andrea — yep, another Andrea! — has retreated to the outskirts of the city to recover after a horrible marriage.
From this, everything is going to be speculation, but we have some ideas. The reigning theory about this companion show is that it is going take place at the beginning of the zombie outbreak. With the flagship series, you don’t see how things start, you wake up smack in the middle of it with Rick, and, from these descriptions anyway, it sounds like we may finally see what happened when the shit goes down, following members of two families. I’m curious to see if this is two families together in one group, or if it follows the separate adventures of each unit.
However this shakes out, at least this should present a different perspective on this zombie apocalypse. We know what it looks like in Georgia after spending four plus seasons there, but we know nothing about how things went down anywhere else in the world. The Walking Dead spinoff should shuffle onto your TVs sometime next fall.
