THE WALKING DEAD Takes to the Air in 2016


“I’ve had it with these mutha-f#&kin zombies on my mutha-f#&kin plane!”

I couldn’t fit that pun into the headline.

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When you have a show as big as The Walking Dead you can afford to bend the rules of narrative presentation a little, creating something totally unprecedented and kinda cool. The spin-off show Fear The Walking Dead (check out our review) recently kicked off and AMC were so confident in it originally that a fifteen-episode second season has already been ordered. That’s a hell of a lot of zombie content coming your way in 2016. Guess what? There’s more on the way.

Entertainment Weekly has learned that AMC are developing a half-hour special set in the timeframe of Fear, detailing what would happen if somebody turned into a walker whilst on a plane. The concept sounds terrifying and it could turn into an excellent little claustrophobic horror, but what’s even cooler is that one of the survivors will join the cast of said spin-off in its second season (so presumably the plane is headed for LAX). It’ll debut online, but apparently it will also be told in ‘chapters’ during the ad breaks for The Walking Dead; unless I’m misunderstanding, I don’t really see the point in debuting something and then re-debuting it in spread-out chunks.

Even though I gave up on the walkers during Season 4, I’ve gotta admire AMC’s initiative. This is a massive show that people love and they might as well capitalise on that while the audience is there. Doing something like this hasn’t really been done before, in television or film, and it could pave the way for more web series’ or specials for other popular TV shows, whether it’s because they don’t have time to cover it on the show or because they want to expand the world – or for money. I could totally see a Game of Thrones special sold on iTunes about Gendry in his boat.

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So, there you have it. That’s pretty much all we know right now but more details will hopefully trickle out sooner rather than later. The concept is really cool – it’s been done a couple of times before, most recently in World War Z, but it worked wonders there and it can work even better when the creative team have a whole half hour to tell the story. Think how fucking terrified you would be if you were thousands of feet in the air on a plane with a zombie (and potentially more zombies), knowing that you likely wouldn’t reach the ground. Would you try and survive? Would there be any point? I might even have to watch it.

Fear The Walking Dead is on AMC now. The Walking Dead is back this October with a super-special feature-length premiere. Untitled Zombies on a Plane Web Spin-Off currently has no release date.