For all of the excitement and nerve-wracking tension generated by The Walking Dead‘s season 7 premiere, it’s no secret that the remainder of the show’s most recent run fell victim to pacing issues, leading to AMC’s flagship posting some of its lowest ratings in four years.
Those numbers bounced back just as season 7 started to reach its bloody conclusion, but if you’re worried that the upcoming eighth season will repeat the same mistakes, don’t; showrunner Scott M. Gimple has assured viewers that season 8 will motor along at a “breakneck” pace. As Gimple revealed to Entertainment Weekly, that accelerated pacing largely comes down to the fact that the upcoming season of The Walking Dead will tout a “very different” structure to its forebears, one that will seemingly skirt around individual story arcs in favor of a more “kinetic” storytelling flow. Don’t be expecting too many “deep dives” into your favorite survivors, essentially. Not within single episodes, at least.
Per EW:
By virtue of the fact that the narrative has turned into one of pretty intense conflict, it’s going to affect the structure in ways that make it a bit more kinetic, a bit more breakneck — shifting away from entire stories in one episode, and sort of fractured over several episodes, with little pieces of each story coming together.”
That intense conflict spilled over in The Walking Dead season 7 finale, when Ezekiel and Shiva rode in to save the day – and Rick and Carl – at the eleventh hour. Such a nail-biting, bloody climax naturally resulted in some casualties, and here, Gimple teased the ways in which season 8 will mix up the structure fans have become accustomed to.
[This is] because we knew the way that [season] 7 was going to be structured, and we knew we wanted to mix it up in 8, and we knew what 8 was going to be and how that would dictate a very different kind of structure anyways. So, yeah, things are going to move, and possibly not have the kind of deep dives into characters in single episodes, but rather laying out the pieces as we go on. Things are going to move, and possibly not have the kind of deep dives into characters in single episodes, but rather laying out the pieces as we go on.
Production on season 8 of The Walking Dead kicks off on May 1st. That places AMC’s undead flagship on course for a premiere in late 2017, at which point TWD will get “straight to the righteous battle” between Rick and Negan’s warring groups of survivors.