The Walking Dead Anthology Spinoff Sets TWD Veteran as Showrunner

A veteran writer-producer of The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead will serve as showrunner on Tales of the Walking Dead, the anthology spin-off series in development at AMC Networks. Created by former Walking Dead showrunner and current Walking Dead Universe chief content officer Scott Gimple, Tales is an episodic anthology that tells tales about new or existing characters — including returning fan-favorites who have already died. According to Gimple, Tales is a “grab-bag” made up of individual episodes or arcs of episodes revealing backstories or other stand-alone experiences across different periods in the Walking Dead zombie apocalypse.

Channing Powell, a veteran writer-producer of The Walking Dead since its fourth season in 2013, will serve as showrunner on Tales of the Walking Dead. Powell revealed her showrunner position on Instagram.

Powell’s credits include the Season 4 episode “Inmates,” which introduces Abraham Ford (Michael Cudlitz) and his traveling companions Rosita (Christian Serratos) and Eugene (Josh McDermitt), as well as the devastating Season 9 episode “The Calm Before” and the Season 10 episode “Look at the Flowers.” As a writer and consulting producer on spin-off Fear the Walking Dead, Powell penned the Season 6 episodes “The Holding” and “Mother,” both involving Alicia Clark’s (Alycia Debnam-Carey) encounter with the underground cult of Teddy Maddox (John Glover).

Outside of TWD Universe, Powell served as writer and story editor on the Matt Bomer-starring police procedural White Collar and created the dystopian sci-fi thriller The Feed. Tales is Powell’s second time showrunning, making her the second female creator to head a TWD series behind The Walking Dead’s Angela Kang (Seasons 9, 10, and 11).

“We’re working on it. Our operating principle right now is single hours that are very different week to week,” Gimple said when updating Tales during a recent stream with TWDUniverse. “We’ve left the door open to tell longer maybe multi-episode stories in the universe. We want to keep it really flexible. But to start out with, we want a bunch of very different stories where the audience isn’t going to know what to expect.”

Describing Tales as more Twilight Zone and less American Horror Story, the anthology spin-off “goes back to those questions people have been asking about different situations, or what happened with different characters that we have had already, and then things that are just not related to anything we’ve told,” Gimple said. “That’s the kind of thing we want to do. We’re working on it hard.”

A premiere date for Tales is TBA. Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD Universe.