The Walking Dead Producers: Season Five is Bigger, More Complicated Than Ever From the Production Side

Executive Producers Robert Kirkman and David Alpert had two interesting, but very different, answers for the fairly basic question of what was the biggest challenge for Season Five, and before we delve too deep into the roundtable interviews, it seemed worth a peek behind the curtain at their thinking…

Robert Kirkman: Story-wise, every season is a big challenge. This is a show about escalation and evolution and how these characters are changing and we always want to top ourselves. So there’s a lot of work that’s done analyzing what we’ve done before and where we’re going to go next and how we’re going to make it better, cooler, fantastic.

So that’s something that we put a tremendous amount of effort into but going into Season Five, to a certain extent we’re a well-oiled machine. We’ve been using the same crew, we’ve been using the same people, we’ve got great directors coming back, we’ve got Greg Nicotero doing our premiere and I feel like — you guys know better than I do — but we’re just rocking and rolling and we’re just a great unit that’s moving along at a great pace and that things are going really well. As far as challenge wise, I don’t think Season Five has been daunting in any way, although we are doing some bigger things and some complicated things. That has been somewhat taxing.

David Alpert: I also think there’s been planted a lot of storylines in previous seasons and previous episodes and making sure we deliver on the promise of those storylines, making sure that those characters and all the work that goes into that is all tied together so that you can enjoy each individual episode but ultimatley you’re rewarded for close viewing. We want to make sure it’s working on multiple levels.