Fear the Walking Dead Season 6 Is the Best-Rated Season With Audiences and Critics

Fear the Walking Dead season 6 is now the best-rated season of the Walking Dead spinoff on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, where the anthology-style sixth season sits at an 86% fresh. The well-received sixth season is a one-eighty for Fear after the companion series in 2019 aired the worst-reviewed episode of either show during its fifth season, which was the only “rotten” season of the Walking Dead Universe franchise until TWD: World Beyond. Fear‘s season 5 (55%) is now the second-lowest rated season of the franchise following the October start of two-season limited event series World Beyond, which currently holds 38% approval from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

Fear the Walking Dead’s ongoing season 6, the third season from showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg, currently holds an 86% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes to top the 84% scored by the Dave Erickson-ran season 3. The new season also secured the best audience score in series history at 86%, overtaking season 3 (78%), season 4 (65%), season 1 (62%), season 2 (59%), and season 5 (43%).

Those numbers put Fear season 6 in the upper percentile of franchise seasons. The current season is now ranked sixth place for the overall Walking Dead series, behind only The Walking Dead seasons 9 and 10 (both 91%), season 5 (90%), season 1 (87%), and season 3 (88%).

Responding to the broadly negative response to Fear‘s fifth season, series executive producer and Walking Dead chief content officer Scott Gimple said the season was only half of a whole — with the sixth season filling in the other half.

“We’ve been lucky enough on that show to be able to do these long-range plans,” Gimple told Entertainment Weekly earlier this year. “Season 5 was about setting up this journey that these characters are on through there to season 6, and I think people are going to see the relationship between those two seasons.”

Gimple went on to compare its reception to the second season of The Walking Dead, which found new life when viewers revisited — and binge-watched — the mostly farm-set season 2 on Netflix.

“I’m curious how people will watch [Fear season 5] in the future. Season 2 [of TWD], when we did it, we were assailed in a lot of ways,” Gimple said. “‘Why are they on the farm? Why are doing this? Why are they doing that?’ I think in subsequent years, people watching that season had different takes.”

He continued, “This season 5 as a piece setting up season 6 into a truly serialized entertainment, I think people might see the relationship and the journey, why the journey went the way it did. I was so happy with the way that everybody did. I think it really did come together in the end in this really tragic way that we couldn’t have gotten to without the journey that we had been on.”

Last season ended with Morgan Jones (Lennie James) shot and left for dead by villain Virginia (Colby Minifie) inside the walker-swarmed Humbug’s Gulch. In the sixth season, which airs its midseason finale with episode 607 on November 22, Morgan is methodically reuniting his group of zombie apocalypse survivors who were split up and dispersed across Virginia’s settlements.

Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD. New episodes of Fear the Walking Dead season 6 premiere Sundays at 9 pm ET/8c on AMC.