At the TCA Winter Press Tour, The Walking Dead executive producer/writer/comic book creator Robert Kirkman, along with showrunner/executive producer Glen Mazzara spoke to Collider about the second half of the show's sophomore season. Here are some highlights of the interview, starting with how the two felt about the audience response that the show's pace was too slow.
MAZZARA: Well, I could make the case that that’s true for a certain segment of the audience. People have expectations about the show, and the show is a difficult show to write because, if we have a zombie attack every week, people say it’s the zombie-of-the-week. And, if we don’t have zombies, people say there are no zombies. So, it’s a challenging situation. I think that we’ve looked at making each episode as interesting and as compelling as possible. I think we get better at that, as it goes on. There might be some folks who would love for the show to be more of a video game. I’ll say this: the show is improving. If there were episodes that felt as if they were stalling, or that they weren’t under threat, and that perhaps the farm felt too safe and the threats were outside off the farm, a lot of that changes, in the back part of the season. I think that things pick up. It just becomes more accelerated. The stakes are higher, it’s more action-packed and it’s more interesting. By the end of these six episodes, hopefully those fans will agree that this is a thrill ride because we really do feel there are huge pay-offs, coming up in each episode. You won’t have to wait for just the last episode. Maybe there weren’t pay-offs, along the way.
KIRKMAN: I think that building to that reveal of Sophia was a pay-off that we were working towards, and I think we did a good job of working towards it. I would also like to say that the Sophia reveal is really the beginning of an escalation that takes us all the way through to the end of our season. We started out searching for Sophia, and then things got a little bit heightened, when we found her in the barn. That’s going to lead to a lot of conflict. That’s going to lead to a new threat on the horizon, that you’ll see in our first episode back, which is really going to dovetail into a big series of events that’s going to lead us to our finale. So, having that big escalation would not work as well, we feel, if we didn’t have those episodes. We recognize this criticism, and it is valid, but we are working on a 13-piece puzzle that, as a whole, should be seen in a different light. We’re hoping that, when it’s all put together, people will see that it all came together in a good way.
Kirkman conceded that the "new threat" is the two men (and likely others not shown) revealed in a recent clip that were created just for the show and will establish a theme from the comic book (and zombie movies in general) that humans can be the worst threat to themselves after a zombie apocalypse.
KIRKMAN: Well, anyone who’s familiar with the comic book series knows that, while the zombies are threatening and terrifying, and do represent a tremendous amount of danger for our characters, nothing compares to the danger that humans hold for each other. That’s a big theme that we deal with in the comic book series, and that’s something that we’re moving towards in the show, as well. The capacity for humans to hurt each other is just infinite. As we explore this world, in a broader sense, and open things up outside the farm, in these episodes coming up, we’re going to see that there are some tremendous threats out there, and they’re human in nature, not zombie.
MAZZARA: Yeah. Once they break down how to fight zombies, zombies are a relatively known quantity. The human quantity is never known. So, that is a new element where, now that we have our characters established and our world established, we want to break it down, mess it up, make it complicated, and give our characters as many obstacles as we can. They become obstacles to each other. They have to deal with the outside world. The farm is no longer safe. There’s nowhere to go. And, we just keep piling on problem after problem, like that.
The two producers also talked about the departed Frank Darabont and his recently revealed Season 2 opener that never came to fruition but would have been awesome.
KIRKMAN: That’s a strange thing. I will say that you’re pretty much watching what Frank Darabont’s Season 2 would have been.
MAZZARA: That’s correct.
KIRKMAN: Frank moved off of that idea, in the room, before he was ever taken off of the show. That was something that he came into the room with and did have planned, from the very filming of the pilot. I remember when we were on set filming the pilot, he was telling me about Sam Witwer coming in and playing the zombie, and how he had plans to come back to that, eventually. But, when we broke it in the room, with Glen and all the other writers, we all decided, as a whole, coming out of that Jenner episode, and how that focused on Jenner in the CDC and didn’t really deal with our characters in any real significant way, coming back for a second season, with a different character that isn’t our main characters, and telling his story, didn’t seem like the right way to open the season. That was something that really came out of the room.
MAZZARA: So, the point is that Frank Darabont was the showrunner, at the time we chose to move off of that idea. That idea was never outlined, as far as I know. It was never written as a script. It was never budgeted. It was never presented to anyone, except the internal writers room, in any significant pitch way. I’ve been surprised at the attention this is getting, so I’m glad to clear it up because that just wasn’t the case. I don’t know if Frank actually said that he wrote it, or it was a pitch. It was just something we talked about. The other thing is that this actor is on a show called Being Human. So, another thing was that we’d have to begin production with someone who’s tied to another show. That was an issue that Frank did not want to get into. Is this guy going to be available for our shoot, when we have to build out the whole season? That was another factor that we discussed. That’s the case behind that.
Pretty great interview. To read the whole thing, head here. Otherwise, The Walking Dead resumes on February 12th. What time? Check your local listings! I can't do it all for you!
