It’s the beginning of the end for The Walking Dead. The long-running drama’s final season is upon us, although fans don’t have to start weeping just yet as we’ve got 24 hour episodes still to go. The super-sized season is being delivered in three batches of eight – which AMC is calling the Final Season Trilogy – that will run through 2022. The hype is real, then, and we’re being promised that the show is going to “go out with a bang”.
That’s how producer Denise Huth put it, while speaking during a recent Twitch livestream with TWDUniverse about the incoming last season. She briefly teased the “cool story” to come as well as heaping praise on the fans for sticking with the post-apocalyptic franchise all these years and allowing it to become such a phenomenon.
“We’ll go out with a bang. Nothing lasts forever,” Huth said. “It’s a cool story, and I’m so proud, and I’m so grateful that we’ve been able to tell it as fully as we’ve been allowed to do, and that’s one hundred percent a credit to the fans. If fans don’t show up, the show doesn’t go on.”
Norman Reedus has previously described season 11 as “mind-blowing”, revealing that its mammoth episode count will be split into two – the first half will deal with the threat of the Reapers, villains who are original to TV, while the second will move onto the Commonwealth arc, drawing from the last couple of volumes of the comic book. Reedus says the Reaper storyline will be like a gritty “western” while the Commonwealth episodes will have a more “technicolor” vibe.
But though Huth is saying the show will go out with a bang, don’t forget that it’s only the parent series that’s ending, as AMC has plans for years more of the TWD universe to come. Reedus will be back as Daryl, for instance, in a spinoff show co-starring Melissa McBride’s Carol that’s debuting next year. Then there’s anthology show Tales of the Walking Dead. Not to mention those long-gestating Andrew Lincoln movies.
The Walking Dead season 11 premieres Sunday, August 22nd on AMC. AMC Plus subscribers, meanwhile, can catch it a week earlier on August 15th.