Following the departure of Melissa McBride from the Carol/Daryl The Walking Dead spinoff series, it looks like there have been a few more changes made to the show as Angela Kang will no longer be acting as showrunner as expected. Instead, David Zabel, best known as the showrunner on the medical drama ER, will be taking over the new series, which is now currently going simply by the name of Daryl in reference to Norman Reedus’ character.
The new Walking Dead spinoff has not had an easy time of late, and after being teased and promoted for months as the continuation of the story of Daryl and Carol, in the last week it has lost one-half of its leads and now seemingly changed showrunner. While Kang will now not be assuming her showrunner role for the new series, she will stay on as executive producer on the show that is set to shoot in Europe this summer for a 2023 premiere.
The main series of The Walking Dead comes to its climax this fall, with the final part of the 11th season bringing the zombie saga to a close just a couple of years after creator Robert Kirkman unexpectedly ended the comic book series it is based on. While there have been times when the series has been criticized for drawing out its storylines too much and becoming a “soap opera with zombies,” the final season has really kicked up a gear and brought back some of what made The Walking Dead great in its first few seasons. Despite the flagship series bowing out, there is still a lot more to come from the world of The Walking Dead.
The Walking Dead Spinoffs Begin With This Summer’s Tales of The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead universe has been expanding for a number of years with the ongoing Fear The Walking Dead show and the short two-season spin-off Walking Dead: World Beyond, which ended by revealing exactly what caused the zombie apocalypse in a laboratory in France. While this is potentially setting up the spin-off that will now follow Daryl from the U.S. to Europe, there are other spinoffs also coming.
This summer will see the arrival of Tales of the Walking Dead, a series of individual stories set in and around the familiar world of the franchise. This series has been promised to feature some familiar faces from the past, and while the stories themselves will be isolated in their telling, it is expected that they will all fit within the known overarching narrative of The Walking Dead’s main series. Although there has been little released about the show, filming took place in Georgia earlier in the year and is thought to have already wrapped.
In addition to this, next year will also see Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan reprising their respective roles as Negan and Maggie for Isle of the Dead. The series, which is probably the most anticipated spinoff from the show, will see the once enemies together on a zombie-infested Manhattan for a six-episode series. Whether this and other spinoffs will be teased in any way at the end of the main show’s new episodes is something that is not yet known, but so far next year is looking good for fans of the long-running franchise.