The Walking Dead’s Melissa McBride Exits Daryl and Carol Spinoff Series

The Walking Dead Universe just got hit with a major shock, as franchise star Melissa McBride has exited the planned spinoff series focusing on Carol and Daryl. Reports are saying that with McBride’s exit, the new Walking Dead spinoff series will instead focus entirely on Norman Reedus’s Daryl. It’s being said that the decision to drop Carol from the spinoff was “purely creative”; McBride has been with The Walking Dead since it first premiered in 2010. Her character Carol was a minor character in Robert Kirkman’s source comic, but thanks to McBride, Carol has become one of the franchise’s leading icons. 

“The Walking Dead flagship series has been my creative home for a decade and so it’s bittersweet to bring it to an end, but I could not be more excited to be working with Scott Gimple and AMC to develop a new series for Daryl and Carol,” said TWD showrunner Angela Kang when the spinoff was announced. “Working with Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride has been a highlight of my career and I’m thrilled that we get to keep telling stories together.”

Longtime producer and Walking Dead Universe architect Scott Gimple had also shared the fact that this Daryl and Carol series was designed to keep The Walking Dead story going – even after the main series ends this year: 

“There are ways the story, of course, was going to continue to keep going,” Gimple told Insider. “But it is going to continue to keep going with Daryl and Carol. It’s going to be a different show with a different tone, but the story of that corner of The Walking Dead, in some ways, it continues to go through them. Angela and I have been working on a story for a while, and there’s just a very super interesting story there,” Gimple added.

Well, now that interesting story will have to be told through one character, instead of the dynamic between Daryl and Carol. It’s perfectly understandable that McBride might be having second thoughts: The Walking Dead franchise has been reaching hard for old glory for some time, and many of the original stars of the show (who saw their characters survive) have opted to move on. 

The 2021 episode of Walking Dead, “Diverged” acted as something of a test pilot for the Daryl & Carol show, focusing on just those two characters, struggling with their relationship bond and respective personal issues. “Diverged” was one of the most hated-on episodes of TWD in years, so maybe Melissa McBride is right to get off the ride with end of the main Walking Dead series? 

“I can’t tell you a whole lot about the spin-off. I can tell you that it won’t look anything like The Walking Dead,” Reedus once told IMDb. “It won’t look like an episode of Walking Dead with just Daryl and Carol. It’ll be completely different.”

Source: TV Line