The living dead are like serial actors, they always come back at some point. The new version of the universe The Walking Deadentitled Tales of the Walking Dead (available in France on OCS), is an opportunity to find faces known to series fans, first and foremost Terry Crews, brilliant lieutenant and body-builder dad in Brooklyn 99. We also meet Anthony Edwards from Emergency roomOlivia Munn of The NewsroomParker Posey of Lost in Space…
This aside, Tales of the Walking Dead unlike any other series, and certainly not like The Walking Dead, parent series. While their flagship had been losing steam for years, AMC delivered the coup de grace with a final season. At the same time, the series’ spin-offs have been rather disappointing. This new version therefore looks like a swan song for the franchise.
Unless…
Another death is possible
Unless the public lets itself be charmed – and there is reason – by this new format, conceived as the antithesis of The Walking Dead. Longer seasons are over. Tales.. is a six-part anthology. No more long interminable intrigues with endless twists. Tales… is made up of six independent stories that are completed in just over an hour. And above all, no more zombies. Of course the monsters are still there but in Tales…, they are part of the decor. The real heroes are the characters and especially the scenarios.
By exploring other places (goodbye Atlanta…) and other temporalities (we discover for example another version of the first days of the zombie epidemic), Tales of the Walking Dead allows himself to tell other stories. Less horrific, more melancholy. And other rhythms. Either much more breathless with a tight plot, or more poetic, or downright comical. Outrage?
Broaden the horizon
Of course, we find (in addition to the decomposed faces of the zombies), some familiar faces, like Alpha (Samantha Morton), before she became the formidable leader of the Whisperers in The Walking Dead. But apart from her, the score played is quite new.
“We wanted to broaden the horizon of the universe, explains Channing Powell to justify that so few characters and settings from the original series are shown in Tales of the Walking Dead. There is a mythology and rules to respect: how walkers work, the genesis of the apocalypse… But with that, we wanted to have fun, to take the story elsewhere. »
And I put the sound back
The showrunner makes no secret of having had ten times more ideas for episodes than stories actually shot. A way for him, and for the producers of the saga, to suggest that The Walking Dead is not dead, even if the main series is completed.
Thus, three spin-offs with still unknown formats are in preparation. One on the character of Daryl Dixon who crosses the Atlantic, another on Dead City, and a last on the “power couple” Rick and Michonne.
But if Tales… is successful, nothing will prevent AMC from going further. To tell new stories.