Fear The Walking Dead: Kirkman Reveals Details About Main Characters

As we do know, AMC's hit zombie drama The Walking Dead is getting a companion series, titled Fear The Walking Dead, which premieres this summer on the same network. What we don't know is pretty much any sort of details about the show other than the cast or the fact that it's set in Los Angeles - until now.

Robert Kirkman recently spilled some facts about the characters we'll be coming to know while talking to EW about the new series. Kirkman revealed that the characters are part of a blended family, comprised on one side of widowed teacher Madison (Kim Dickens), her high school stand-out daughter Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey), and her college dropout son Nick (Frank Dillane). On the other side, divorced fellow teacher Travis (Cliff Curtis) and his son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie) who resents his father for the split up with his mother. Henry's inclusion is the latest cast member reveal. He recently starred in Paul Blart Mall Cop 2.

Kirkman says, "At its core this is a story of Travis and Madison, who are these two schoolteachers that both have kids from previous marriages and are very much in love." Unlike one of The Walking Dead's early plot lines, which carry an effect on the series today, Fear will follow a happy, faithful couple Kirkman explained. "This is a show about two people who are a team, and they do back each other up. They do love and respect each other. They're a happy couple, which is something that you don't see a lot of on cable television these days. Usually cable television focuses on infidelity, love triangles, divorces, marriages breaking down—that's really the meat and potatoes of the drama we mostly deal with on TV. So having this interesting couple at the core of this show, fighting against the backdrop of civilization crumbling and the zombie apocalypse, really is the core of things. They've got two sets of kids. It's an interesting situation." As for how long Travis and Madison have been together, Kirkman says, "They are dating and working very quickly toward marriage."

"These are characters that are focused on survival and they're not focused on saving the world and they're not focused on curing the outbreak. They're focusing on making sure they have enough food, making sure that they're in a safe place, and making sure that they're not being attacked. In that respect, it will be somewhat similar to the original show, but they're going to be surviving in much different ways. And they're going to be with much different people and be in an extremely different location," Kirkman explained.

The couple isn't a bunch of slouches according to Kirkman. He says that being a teacher equips people with resourceful abilities that could help in an apocalyptic setting. "I think schoolteachers are on the front lines of a lot of things these days with kids and parents and families and all kinds of different elements of society. They are fairly tough individuals, so we're going to be dealing with a couple of fairly tough individuals on this show."

The writer also explained the timing of the events compared to The Walking Dead's, saying we are "watching the world crumble around them, and people are very much unprepared for this world that they're in and having to very quickly adapt."

He later added, "We're very early, but if you think about the way a zombie outbreak would happen, it would happen very organically. It would be happening for a while behind the scenes. In pockets of civilization there would be news stories that didn't really make sense and didn't seem connected. And that's kind of where we pick things up. There are a lot of things on the news, there's a lot of chatter and paranoia and concern. And yet the vast majority of the population is ignoring these things and talking about their daily lives, and that's kind of where we pick things up. And things ramp up very quickly from there."

Fear The Walking Dead premieres this summer on AMC, and The Walking Dead returns in October.