“Fear The Walking Dead” will be the title of AMC’s new series, set in Los Angeles and in the same universe that contains Rick Grimes and Daryl Dixon.
The first season of the spin-off series, launching this year, will consist only of six episodes. No episode count is given for the already-greenlit second season.
The first “Walking Dead” series, following the adventures of Rick & Daryl, is the most popular series on television at the moment.
The new series will follow an entirely different set of characters.
Kim Dickens (“Deadwood,” “Gone Girl”) plays a guidance counselor trying to survive the zombie apocalypse alongside her teacher boyfriend, played by New Zealander Cliff Curtis (star of recent one-season wonders “Trauma,” “Missing,” and “Gang Related”).
Frank Dillane (who played 16-year-old Tom Riddle in 2009’s antepenultimate Harry Potter movie) and Alycia Debnam Carey (who starred with Sarah Wayne Callies in last summer’s tornado movie “Into The Storm”) play the Dickens character’s kids. The kids are described as “screwed up” and “ambitious,” respectively. The Dickens character is described as having an “edge” and a “past.”
Dave Erickson, who wrote six episodes of “Canterbury’s Law” (starring Julianna Margulies as a lawyer!), 17 episodes of “Sons of Anarchy” and two episodes of AMC’s “Low Winter Sun,” will serve as the “Walking Dead” spinoff’s chief creative force alongside Robert Kirkman, a “Walking Dead” writer who also created the comic book on which the series is based.
The new series will feature far fewer Englishmen faking hillbilly accents.
