How The Walking Dead: World Beyond will connect to the other series

The Walking Dead franchise is showing no signs of slowing down; the flagship series is in the midst of its tenth season, with the sixth season of Fear the Walking Dead set to debut later this year, and in addition to the trilogy of Walking Dead movies starring Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes, there's also another new spin-off series ready to launch this year as well. That's a hell of a lot of walkers.

The new series, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, is set ten years after the zombie apocalypse and will feature two young female protagonists as it focuses on "the first generation to come-of-age in the apocalypse as we know it. Some will become heroes. Some will become villains. In the end, all of them will be changed forever. Grown-up and cemented in their identities, both good and bad." While speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Walking Dead chief content officer Scott M. Gimple discussed how this new series will connect to the rest of the franchise.

We’re going to be discovering this very big aspect to the world that we haven’t yet seen. We’ve seen glimpses of it on the shows with the helicopters and with the soldier that we saw, Isabelle on Fear. The movie does obviously touch upon some of that mythology as well as Rick being in one of those helicopters. In some ways, World Beyond, it’s a big story and yet it’s sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Rick’s Hamlet, meaning the show and the movie touch upon some of the same things, but they’re not really that deeply related. We’ll learn more though about that group, that civilization, the nature of some other civilizations of the world through World Beyond, and that will give some of the background for the world that Rick finds himself in. But the story of World Beyond doesn’t really intersect with the movies other than they share knowledge and interaction with some of these bigger things going on in the world.

"I mean, they do share a universe. Though it is really cool to see how this different corner of the universe operates and the lives that they have been living all this time, it will be these little places that cross," Gimple continued. "We’ve been talking about aspects of next season of World Beyond. There might even be a big aspect of crossover with one of the shows. That’s the other part of it is we have these plans, but we’ve got to execute them. That’s sort of next season. We’re still finishing up this season. They do share a universe, so where there are opportunities, we want to take them." Gimple also added that The Walking Dead: World Beyond is actually a "little behind" the current timeline of The Walking Dead, but "not in any way that anyone will possibly notice."

With three TV shows, plus a trilogy of movies, is Scott Gimple at all worried about over-saturating the market with Walking Dead properties? "In my mind, it really was: There are always going to be zombie stories being told, so why don’t we tell them? If it’s not us, other people will. They always have. There is sort of a signature approach that we have that we do want to mix up as well," Gimple said. "We want The Walking Dead to mean different things, and we’re going to continue to do that. I think we’ve reached a point where people enjoy a variety of different stories within the same universe. They understand that. As long as we make these stories different, stand out from one another, they can enjoy all those cool things about that universe, but just feature different characters, different journeys, different emotional pallets, different voices telling those stories. My goal is to do more and to do more varied entertainment. Walkers versus people is just one aspect of the story, and there’s also a story of the apocalypse, and it’s a story of some people trying to put things back together, some people trying to pull them apart, and there’s just a universe of stories to be told in there. Our job is to make them as different from one another as possible so that that part of it doesn’t feel repetitious. Each show should scratch its own different itch."

The second half of The Walking Dead's tenth season will debut on AMC on February 23, 2020.