The Walking Dead showrunner says that season 8 will move at a faster pace

Last Updated on July 31, 2021

Although its ratings are still quite impressive, viewership for AMC's The Walking Dead dropped significantly throughout its seventh season. One of the common criticisms lobbed at the season as a whole was its poor pacing, but that's something which Walking Dead showrunner Scott Gimple says will be remedied in the eighth season. Gimple spoke with Entertainment Weekly and said the pace will be much faster due to the subject matter of the upcoming season, but that there may be less of the self-contained episodes which focus on one particular community.

By virtue of the fact that the narrative has turned into one of pretty intense conflict, it’s going to affect the structure in ways that make it a bit more kinetic, a bit more breakneck — shifting away from entire stories in one episode, and sort of fractured over several episodes, with little pieces of each story coming together.

The seventh season finale marked the beginning of the "all-out war" arc, and Scott Gimple knew that there would be less time to explore the complexities of certain characters once the war began.

I remember talking about that with [co-executive producer] Angela Kang early on in season 7, because we knew the way that 7 was going to be structured, and we knew we wanted to mix it up in 8, and we knew what 8 was going to be and how that would dictate a very different kind of structure anyways. So, yeah, things are going to move, and possibly not have the kind of deep dives into characters in single episodes, but rather laying out the pieces as we go on.

Production on the eighth season of The Walking Dead is set to get underway in a few days and the series will likely return in October, although the looming writers strike could throw a wrench into those plans.

Will a faster pace help The Walking Dead? What else would you do to improve the series?