The Walking Dead: World Beyond Boss Says You Don't Have to Be Caught Up on TWD to Watch the Spin-Off

When The Walking Dead: World Beyond premieres Oct. 4, it will be debuting just a few weeks shy of The Walking Dead's 10th anniversary. World Beyond was supposed to arrive in April before getting pushed back due to the pandemic, but the October premiere date feels more appropriate for the show anyway. The new spin-off is set about a decade after the start of the zombie apocalypse and follows a group of young people who were about 5 years old when the apocalypse began. They've never really known a world without zombies, just like teenagers now have never really known a world without The Walking Dead. It feels right that the next decade and the next chapter of The Walking Dead story would start with characters younger viewers can see themselves in (and older viewers can watch to look back on what they were like at the start of television's zombie era).

World Beyond is about two sisters, Iris (Aliyah Royale) and Hope (Alexa Mansour), who grew up with relative safety and stability inside a community that, even a decade after the fall of civilization, is still pretty civilized. Their physical needs are so well taken care of that they're able to go to therapy and tend to their emotional needs. But even though they've grown up during the apocalypse, they're still pretty insulated from it. 

Co-creator Matthew Negrete told TV Guide that the young characters in World Beyond are book-smart, not street-smart. But when Iris and Hope get a message of distress from their father, a scientist who is away helping study the virus at another community, they decide to venture out beyond the walls of their colony (which is a college campus in Nebraska) and go on a quest in search of him, alongside their friends Silas (Hal Cumpston) and Elton (Nicolas Cantu), who each have their own reasons for wanting to go. Negrete said that a big influence on the show was the classic coming-of-age movie Stand by Me, which is also about a group of young people setting off on a physical journey and finding themselves along the way. 

World Beyond is coming into The Walking Dead Universe at a time when viewership for The Walking Dead is not as robust as it once was, and a lot of people who used to watch have dropped off. But the new show is a great opportunity for people who fell behind to get back on board, since it follows new characters and there's nothing to catch up on (though viewers may want to familiarize themselves with CRM, the group who took The Walking Dead's Rick Grimes away in a helicopter and will play a pivotal role in World Beyond). 

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Negrete, who created the show with The Walking Dead Universe chief content officer Scott Gimple, said it should be easy for anyone to jump right into the new show. "The Walking Dead: World Beyond isn't so much a spin-off as it is a companion show to The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead, and you definitely don't need to have watched those other series to jump right in," he told TV Guide. "Beyond is centered around a brand new group characters who live in a brand new corner of the Universe we've never seen before on either of the other shows. All you need to know is that 10 years ago, the world fell apart, the dead started roaming the Earth, and small pockets of civilizations survived. When anyone dies, they come back to life as an 'empty' (which is what we call zombies on our show), and until they're stabbed or shot in the head, they'll roam the earth forever, feasting on anything that lives. That's it — easy peasy!"

The biggest change from The Walking Dead is that World Beyond was conceived as a closed-ended story, unlike the flagship show and comic, which creator Robert Kirkman designed to be able to last forever (though the comic ended in 2019 and the show will be ending in 2022). World Beyond will run for two seasons of 10 episodes each. Negrete said that he and Gimple always knew where they wanted the characters to end up, but they didn't know how exactly they were going to get there. The decision to make the series two seasons long came while they were working on it, as did the decision to change directors from Jordan Vogt-Roberts to Magnus Martens, a Fear the Walking Dead veteran who directed the first two episodes and the finale of World Beyond Season 1. Vogt-Roberts, the Kong: Skull Island director who was initially attached to World Beyond, is credited as a co-executive producer on the pilot, and Negrete said that he contributed some ideas to the episode, but as the writers cracked the rest of the story and figured out exactly what the show was, the production had to go in a different direction, which led them to bring on Martens. 

Negrete and his writing staff have been working on Season 2 over Zoom since April and are currently working on Episode 7 of the second season. No start date has been set for a return to physical production, but Negrete hopes they'll be able to get back to filming the series soon, as long as it's safe to do so. 

The Walking Dead: World Beyond premieres Sunday, Oct. 4 at 10/9c on AMC after the finale of The Walking Dead's Whisperer War.