LOS ANGELES — Here on the set of the new prequel “Fear the Walking Dead,” a mother, her son and her boyfriend are crammed together in the cab of a beat-up Ford truck, terrified that something’s not quite right in their city.
LOS ANGELES — Here on the set of the new prequel “Fear the Walking Dead,” a mother, her son and her boyfriend are crammed together in the cab of a beat-up Ford truck, terrified that something’s not quite right in their city.
After the pickup careens out of a tunnel to the Los Angeles River, the mother frantically tries to call her other child, while the sullen teenager twirls the radio dial, fruitlessly seeking information about the disturbing sights they’ve witnessed.
“Nobody’s talking about this,” he says with disbelief. “Nobody’s saying anything.”
Come Aug. 23, when “Fear the Walking Dead” has its premiere on AMC, they will.
“The Walking Dead” has more than 20 million weekly viewers, and this companion series enables the network to dip back into its enormous, devoted fan base, this time with a dark family drama. It will explore some of the same ideas about survival and human nature but will also stake out its own thematic terrain.
The new show will make a character of the urban, arid chaos of Los Angeles, not the rural swampiness of Georgia and Virginia. And rather than beginning four to five weeks into the epidemic, it will portray a world just beginning to confront a shattering upheaval.
“I think more than anything else, ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ will get to show people coming to grips with society crumbling around them in a way we mostly skipped over on ‘The Walking Dead,’” said Robert Kirkman, a creator of both shows and “The Walking Dead” comic-book series.
The series does not come without risks for the creators and AMC, which would like to add more buzz-worthy hits to a lineup that no longer has “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” Unlike the flagship show, there’s no comic book providing a structural backbone. The carefully calibrated slow build of dread could alienate prospective fans who prefer more zombie carnage. And spinoffs that share none of the same characters or aren’t variations of the tried-and-true police procedural format are exceedingly rare in TV history.
“If this one works, it’s going to be a first in my television experience,” said Tim Brooks, a former executive at NBC, USA Networks and Lifetime Television and the co-author of “The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present.”
The blended family at the center of “Fear the Walking Dead” is completely ill-prepared to survive in this changed world.
Kim Dickens (“Deadwood,” “Treme”) plays Madison, a high school guidance counselor and single mother of two teenagers, one a drug addict (Nick, played by Frank Dillane) and the other a seeming golden child (Alicia, played by Alycia Debnam-Carey). Kim’s boyfriend, Travis (Cliff Curtis of “Gang Related”), is an English literature teacher at the same school, and he has moved in. But he has a disaffected teenage son of his own, who wants no part of this new, jury-rigged family as he remains with his mother (Elizabeth Rodriguez of “Orange Is the New Black”).
“It’s very much about two parents who are trying to bring everybody under one roof and protect them,” the showrunner, Dave Erickson, said over breakfast in Los Angeles in mid-July. “The new threat just happens to be zombies.”
The infected don’t look like decaying monsters yet. They’re all fresher, still resembling the colleagues you saw at work the other day, the family members you just made dinner for. Only now they want to rip your throat out. “It’s a bit jarring,” Erickson deadpanned.
“Your first impulse is to help them, and then short of that, to run,” he added. “It isn’t to pick up a handy weapon and bludgeon them to death and crush their skull.”
A coming apocalypse was familiar terrain for Erickson. He had previously written a pilot for a family drama based on a treatment by Kirkman called “Five Year.” The elevator pitch: There’s a meteor coming, you know you have five years until it hits, what do you do with your time before the world ends?
The two men enjoyed working together — except for the part where the show didn’t get made — and stayed in touch over the years. Efforts to bring Erickson into the writers’ room of “The Walking Dead” never quite worked out. But when Kirkman approached him late in 2013 about collaborating on a companion series to “The Walking Dead,” the timing clicked.
AMC was finally ready to capitalize on its biggest success. Charlie Collier, the president and general manager of AMC and SundanceTV, said the question he’s been bombarded with most since “The Walking Dead” debuted is what is going on elsewhere in the apocalypse. But although the possibility of a scripted “Walking Dead” spinoff arose fairly early on, it never progressed much past vague discussion even as “The Talking Dead,” AMC’s live talk show dissecting every episode, racked up mind-boggling numbers. (The most recent season drew an average of 6.5 million viewers, according to Nielsen.)
The first few seasons of the flagship show were not the most stable — or safe places — for its creative masters. Frank Darabont (“The Shawshank Redemption”), who developed the show, was dropped as showrunner just weeks into production for Season 2. His replacement, Glen Mazzara, departed after the third season. But as a new showrunner, Scott M. Gimple, settled in and tensions eased, AMC and Kirkman set about creating a companion series.
The two shows fit under the same mythological umbrella created by Kirkman in his comic-book series, with the same rules governing the type of zombies (the lumbering kind) and how to kill them (stabbing, shooting or smashing them in the head).
The characters are clueless, at first, at what they’re facing, and the actors were encouraged in their ignorance.
As the audition approached, Dickens asked the producers which episodes of “The Walking Dead” she should watch to get a handle on the new show. The response: None.
The biggest difference between the two shows turns on the protagonists.
In “Fear the Walking Dead,” there’s no one like sheriff’s deputy Rick Grimes, who’s used to responding to emergencies and facile with firearms. Instead we get teachers and counselors and students and barbers.
Erickson said that when Kirkman first described his idea for the new series, with Madison and Travis working at a high school in Los Angeles, the one thing he requested was to bring his own personal baggage into the writers’ room. A divorced father of two sons (13 and 15), with a fiancée who has two children of her own, Erickson liked the idea of introducing the fissures in a blended family dynamic, then using the zombie apocalypse to jack those tensions up on a more epic scale.
Do your own children come first? And if your biological children become too much of a burden, do you cast off the weakest link so the rest of the group can survive?
The Los Angeles setting also permitted “Fear the Walking Dead” to show a grittier side to the city than typically seen on screen. The creators promise we’ll never see the Hollywood sign or zombies shuffling past the Griffith Observatory.
The main characters live in El Sereno, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles and one of its most diverse. The cast mirrors the city’s diversity. Rodriguez’s character, Travis’ ex-wife, was reimagined as Latina after the actress read for the part, she said. Travis was originally written as Latino, but that was changed to Maori to reflect Curtis’ heritage.
And “Fear the Walking Dead” pointedly delves into the immigrant experience through Ruben Blades’ character, a barber named Daniel Salazar, who fled El Salvador in the early 1980s. “People who come here have many different reasons,” said Gale Anne Hurd, an executive producer on both “Walking Dead” series. “Quite a few of them are escaping violence in their own countries, want to start over, and Los Angeles is a city of rebirth; it’s a city of reinvention.”
The wild success of “The Walking Dead” — only “The Big Bang Theory” and “NCIS” get better overall ratings, and no series attracts more of the 18- to 49-year-olds who are coveted by advertisers — also brings with it hopes of supersized viewership numbers. But “Fear the Walking Dead” is venturing into untested territory. Most spinoffs feature a character from the original (“Frasier” out of “Cheers,” or “Better Call Saul” from AMC’s own “Breaking Bad”) or are clones of police procedurals (“NCIS: Los Angeles”), not a serialized character drama. And there are no plans to connect the casts of the two shows.
“It would certainly make a good miniseries,” said Brooks, the former TV executive. “It could make a good movie. Will it make a series that goes on for a while? That’s where you really got to have characters that people want to come back and see. That’s the tougher part.”