The Walking Dead writer and consulting producer LaToya Morgan provides an update on Season 11 as scripting work on the new season continues remotely. The writers room headed by showrunner Angela Kang was ordered to begin working from home on March 13 when network AMC delayed physical production on the eleventh season of The Walking Dead and put a pause on production of the sixth season of spinoff Fear the Walking Dead. While industry-wide shutdowns leave the Season 10 finale indefinitely postponed until required post-production work can be completed on the special effects-heavy episode, Morgan and other Walking Dead scribes continue to plan the next season virtually over Zoom.
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“I think Zoom offers a great opportunity to check in with people visually. Seeing everyone’s faces, even if it is in those Brady Bunch boxes, you’re like, ‘Okay, you’re safe. We’re all going to get through this together,’” Morgan told BuzzFeed News. “So it’s reassuring in a sense.”
The virtual meetings usually assemble six to nine people for calls lasting between four and five hours. Morgan added, “Of course this is all disruptive in certain ways, but at the end of the day we’re still able to do our jobs,. We are tremendously fortunate and lucky that we’re able to do that, and any burden or small technological glitches that we have really pale in comparison to the work that’s being done by all our essential workers, our doctors, our nurses, our mail carriers. So we’re able to endure.”
Morgan, whose credits include AMC’s TURN: Washington’s Spies and Into the Badlands, also noted a post-apocalyptic show like The Walking Dead is able to “give people comfort at a time like this.”
“I know it’s odd for that to be something like a horror show,” she said. “But it’s nice to be able to escape for a little while from the news.”
It’s unclear when cameras might begin rolling on The Walking Dead Season 11, once planned for a May shooting start. “As far as [shooting] The Walking Dead and the next season, no one knows when and where and how and if,” Negan actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan said in a recent interview. “It’s a big waiting game to see what’s gonna happen.”
In March, Kang told The Hollywood Reporter the show was already “very well set up to work remotely” after scripting work switched to virtual meetings.
“Today, nobody is going to be at the office. The room will continue to run. We’re doing it by conference call and we’re doing it by video conference. Everything will continue to run, but on a remote basis,” she said. “We use Zoom. This is how we conference with Georgia when we’re in production. I like the face-to-face of it. We’ve done this for many years. Even when we’re not in a pandemic, any time anyone is sick, they just call into the room and it’s not a big deal. We’re very used to doing this.”
The veteran series writer-producer also spoke on comparisons between the ongoing pandemic and The Walking Dead, adding: “All of us are thinking a lot about our own families and people out in the world who are struggling with this. All of us working on a show like this, there’s a part of us who are very pro-preparedness for anything going wrong. The thing a lot of us are thinking about is it’s good how people are really aware right now of how important public health is, and how it can really cause problems. We don’t want to see anyone turning against each other in times like these. Hopefully everyone can come together. Those are the big themes of our show.”
Season 11 of The Walking Dead was expected to premiere October 2020 on AMC. A delayed shooting start means the new season is unlikely to meet that date.
The Walking Dead next airs the Season 10 finale, “A Certain Doom,” as a special episode later this year. For all things TWD, follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter.
