The Walking Dead is coming back a lot earlier than usual to begin its small screen swan song.
AMC revealed during tonight’s ‘Here’s Negan’ Season 10c finale that the zombie apocalypse series based on Robert Kirkman’s comics will premiere its 11th and final season on August 22.
Packed with images of American law enforcement institutions and urban life in a state of abandonment, a judicious reference to vaccines and a glimpse of more of the powerful Commonwealth, the tease promises a return to a very big picture TWD for the mega 24-episode last season – as you can see below:
“Coming off of the six additional episodes for Season 10, which focused on smaller, character-driven stories, we’re excited to kick off Season 11 bigger than ever,” TWD showrunner Angela Kang promises of the final lap. “The stakes will be high – we’ll see more zombies, tons of action, intriguing new stories, never-before-seen locations and our groups together in one community for the first time, trying to rebuild what the Whisperers took from then,” the EP added of the end of once-blockbuster TWD, which was first unveiled on September 9, 2020.
Set to run well in 2022 and with a spinoff already in the works for Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride’s fan favorite characters, the last season of TWD will be released in blocks of approximately eight-episodes each. Unlike past AMC mega-shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men, who split their respective closing cycles in two, TWD will commence its 11th Season with eight-episodes and then with two more chunks to follow.
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Even in a schedule that has been spun around by the coronavirus pandemic and its ongoing effect on production, the upcoming August start to TWD is much more in line with the debut dates for spinoff Fear The Walking Dead than the concluding mothershow. Until this elongated final season, every cycle of TWD has kicked off in October starting with the Halloween premiere of the six-episode first season back in 2010.
In a sense, the 24-episode last season of TWD is really just a small expansion of the current 10th season.
However, running 22 episodes in total if you count tonight’s David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick-penned ‘Here’s Negan,’ unlike the unruly Season 10 with its Covid-19 stops and starts and final backend six episodes, Season 11 of TWD has the benefit of being planned out to the smallest tick and Wildfire virus contagion – which is how any series dreams of going out, isn’t it?