Yet Another ‘Walking Dead’ Spin Off?

With The Walking Dead returning to screens soon from its mid season hiatus, they’re talking about the series once again.  Does it have legs?  Yes apparently.  Talking at the network’s TCA winter tour panel this week, Joel Stillerman tells Vulture that they have no plans to wrap up ‘The Walking Dead’ yet:

“What’s so fascinating about The Walking Dead is that Robert Kirkman set out to do something that proved to be remarkably brilliant in a couple of very fundamental ways. One is he wanted to use the world of the zombie apocalypse as a way to get at social commentary. That was always the killer app for the show. But if you ask Robert what his motivations were for writing The Walking Dead, he would say, ‘I loved zombie movies, but I just felt like the worst part of them was always the ending. You always had to manufacture some ending.’

So he set out to write this totally open-ended story, and the proof of that is in how vibrant the comics are. The answer to how long the show will go on in some way is directly correlated with the health of the storytelling in the comics. Those comics are firing on all cylinders. He still writes every line of dialogue in those books, and is as engaged as he was when I think he was sitting around in Kentucky writing the first issue. That is very much part of the DNA of the show. He sort of felt like, in real life, this goes on for a very long time. We’re along for that ride.”

With the success of the show’s companion series Fear the Walking Dead, which to be honest was better than the main series, AMC says the network is open to exploring other shows set in this world:

“We are open to ideas that feel organic to the creators in whom we’ve put our trust. So if Robert had a world he wanted to explore, you can bet that we are not just leaning into that conversation, but we’re actively engaging in it.

Right now we’re not in that conversation, and there’s nothing to report at all. I’m a huge believer in Robert and the executive producers of these shows. We wanted to create a place where they would bring us their creative dreams and bring us their passion projects. If Robert had another one, we would absolutely engage. This is a world that is rich enough to handle it. Right now we’re just focused on these two.”