Just a few days ago we shared "The Walking Dead" creator Robert Kirkman's thoughts on the upcoming companion series (codenamed "Cobalt") in which he shared that this spinoff would be 'startingly different', and now we've got a confirmation of just how different the new series will be as Bleeding Cool has revealed a few details about the pilot episode.
The purported leaked script which was titled "Fear the Walking Dead" shows that the spinoff will at least start in the early days of the zombie crisis and that…
The intro gives you a swerve, but the infection has not taken hold yet. The “walkers” are not yet known to the population at large, as society stands on the cusp of its own destruction.
This new series is said to revolve around a divorced teacher (Cliff Curtis) and a guidance counselor (Kim Dickens), who are working together and are in a relationship. The counselor has two children from a previous marriage, played by Frank Dillane and Alycia Debnam Carey. Here's how Bleeding Cool describes them:
And we meet a rather disfunctional family – an older one than Rick’s, here are a mother and a soon-to-be-stepfather, teachers Madison and Travis, and their older teenage children, Alicia and Ian, Travis’ ex Liza and their teenage son Christopher, in a family about to break apart. Drugs, illness, self-harm, set in Los Angeles, this is not so much a nuclear family as a dirty bomb. Rick’s family were torn apart, this family are there from the beginning.
As we already know, this series begins before the zombie problem reaches a full-scale outbreak, and the family doesn't know what's about to hit them. Bleeding Cool describes it like this:
Because the dead are coming, An urban legend, underground, being spread from person to person. It plays the fact tat we, the audience, know far more about what’s going on than anything else does and keeps teasing us toward the inevitable, in much the same way that Gotham does, but in the knowledge that it’s going to be over far sooner.
These people all have plans, some in LA, some out, and we all know they are never going to pursue their dreams. This is not The Walking Dead, it’s somewhere else entirely.
"The Walking Dead" spinoff series is reportedly set to premiere later this year.