Characters from the Walking Dead Universe will cross paths for the first time in Tales of the Walking Dead, the episodic anthology looking to bring back fan-favorites who have died in standalone stories set throughout the zombie apocalypse. The new spinoff, now in development at AMC from creator Scott Gimple, will not only revisit past characters but familiar histories and locations from a different vantage point. Described as a grab bag and a different kind of Walking Dead series, Tales will tell the stories unable to play out on the mothership series, or spinoffs Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: World Beyond.
“The very charge of that show is being different … stories that we just couldn’t tell on any of the other shows. And to be different from each other, week to week,” Gimple told The Los Angeles Times. “Some weeks, abject horror. Some weeks, black comedy. Different time periods in the apocalypse. Different kinds of characters. Some episodes that have one character and maybe a lot of dead people.”
Gimple recently revealed Tales is mulling over utilizing animation and music in its stories, to be led by characters who are now dead by the time of The Walking Dead‘s current season taking place a decade post-outbreak.
“And then there will be sprinklings of things that we are familiar with: characters that we’ve lost on the show and their past, seeing how they wound up in the situations [in which] they wound up, or the people that they wound up [as]. And there’s some interesting crossovers,” Gimple said. “There’s a few stories that are like, ‘Oh, wow, that affected that,’ ‘That person affected that; we never knew that.’ … Places or situations that affected our characters, we see how those came to be independent of our characters; with new characters.”
Trips back to Woodbury or Terminus, both villainous locations in the mothership Walking Dead show, are now possible. Along with returns to different corners of the Walking Dead Universe, deceased characters such as Abraham Ford (Michael Cudlitz) will live again.
A fourth season episode of Fear the Walking Dead revealed Abraham and traveling companion Eugene (Josh McDermitt), both hailing from Texas, encountered video journalist Althea (Maggie Grace) during their journey to The Walking Dead. In its fifth season, there were hints Abraham crossed paths with Daniel Salazar (Rubén Blades).
The first Walking Dead crossover occurred at the start of Fear‘s revamped fourth season, where Morgan Jones (Lennie James) defected from the mothership series to the spinoff. And Dwight (Austin Amelio), a former underling of Negan’s (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), resurfaced in the fifth season of Fear after Daryl (Norman Reedus) exiled him from The Walking Dead.
Tales of the Walking Dead will air TBD on AMC. For all things TWD Universe, follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter.