The Walking Dead released an “in production” teaser video showing a behind-the-scenes look at the final season premiere, which will be 2-parts directed by Kevin Dowling. The first time Walking Dead director has directed episodes for FX’s Mayans M.C. and The Strain. The premiere will jump start a giant 24-episode season, which goes back to the scope and scale of the show before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Walking Dead season 11 sneek-peek of the untitled 2-part premiere shows our group of captured survivors — Eugene (Josh McDermitt), King Ezekial (Khary Payton), Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), and Princess (Paola Lazaro) — captured by the Commonwealth soldiers.
The Walking Dead Writer and Producer Jim Barnes on Talk Dead To Me Podcast
“We’re shooting [Season 11 episodes] one and two right now, it’s a two-part episode, a two-part premiere. What can I say? It’s going back to [being] scary, it’s scary,” Walking Dead writer-producer Jim Barnes told the Talk Dead to Me podcast after the start of filming in February. “We’re making a concerted effort to put that back into, especially these first two or three, and actually all throughout [the season]. We’re exploring things and doing things that I haven’t seen done on the show before, which is really exciting. Just different set pieces and locations, and the fact that we’re pulling it off during the pandemic is a testament to the crew in Georgia, it’s incredible. It’s big, I think I can say that.”
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Executive Producer and Showrunner Angela Kang
AMC extended The Walking Dead season 10 with 6 anthology-style episodes, which were also scaled down due to filming during the pandemic. Health and safety protocols limited the scope of the bonus episodes. Executive producer and showrunner Angela Kang promised TWD’s eleventh and final season would return to “our usual scope and scale that people are used to.”
“We’ll start seeing more stories again like the first episode — it’s got everybody on earth in the episode. And tons of zombies and lots of action and fun and intrigue, and locations we’ve never seen, and things like that,” Kang recently told Entertainment Weekly. “So just stylistically, there will be a change from these six [episodes] that we just watched back into our normal season.”
Walking Dead fans can anticipate learning more about the Stormtrooper style soldiers of the Commonwealth who captured Eugene, King Ezekiel, Princess, and Yumiko.
“We’ll be dealing with the new group that our foursome of Eugene, Ezekiel, Princess, and Yumiko ran across and that starts to open up their world in bigger and unexpected ways. Then of course we’ve got to see that Connie is still alive at the end of episode 16, so we still got that thread out there to deal with,” Kang teased. “We’ve got some great stories at Alexandria, as they’re dealing with the aftermath of this Whisperer war and things start to amp up even further. Then it all keeps rolling from there.”
The eleventh and final season of The Walking Dead will premiere August 22nd on AMC.