The Walking Dead Spinoff: Meet the Pilot’s Characters

TVLine got their hands on the details, which give a sense for the first group of survivors we’re likely to meet in the series’ pilot. At least in this iteration, it looks like the pilot will be fairly family-focused, with five of the six characters belonging to one of two families, one headed by a single-mom and one by a single dad:

SEAN CABRERA | A Latino male in his early 40s, Sean is a good man trying to do right by everyone in his life.

CODY CABRERA | Sean’s whip-smart and rebellious teenage son. Known as the angriest kid in town.

NANCY TOMPKINS | A thirtysomething single mom to two kids, Nancy looks like the girl next door, but there’s an edge to her.

NICK TOMPKINS | Nancy’s screwed up teenage son. He’s too old to stay home, too scared to flee.

ASHLEY TOMPKINS | Nancy’s mostly level-headed teenage daughter. Her ambition is in direct proportion to her older brother’s failures. She loves her mom but it’s time to get out of Dodge.

ANDREA CHAPMAN | A somewhat wilted flower child, fortysomething Andrea — yep, another Andrea! — has retreated to the outskirts of the city to recover after a horrible marriage.

With two middle-aged women and a middle-aged man, plus two teenage boys and a teenage girl in the mix, let the shipper wars begin.

You’ve also got gender parity in these first six, a Latino (a group that hasn’t had a ton of representation on The Walking Dead) lead character and older kids. This not only hews to the producers’ previous assurances of exploring some new territory in the spinoff, but in the case of the teenagers likely helps with some of the child labor issues that they faced with Chandler Riggs, who plays Carl Grimes on the parent series.

There’s also, as TVLine notes in their headline, another Andrea — but that’s not uncommon for series creator Robert Kirkman, who has said in interviews that having just one character per given name might make sense in novels or other non-visual media, but in comics and movies it just doesn’t feel realistic or necessary.

The pilot will be written by showrunner Dave Erickson and Kirkman; TVLine reiterated previous rumors that it will be “will be a prequel of sorts, one that would chronicle the early days of the epidemic and the effort to contain it.”