The Walking Dead "In Production" Trailer Teases Final Season's Two-Part Premiere

The Walking Dead releases an 'in production' teaser revealing a behind-the-scenes look at the [...]

By Cameron Bonomolo

The Walking Dead releases an "in production" teaser revealing a behind-the-scenes look at the final season premiere airing August 22 on AMC. The two-part Season 11 premiere from first-time Walking Dead director Kevin Dowling (The Strain, Mayans M.C.) features a full ensemble to kick off the 24-episode final season, which returns to the usual scope and scale longtime viewers expect from the flagship AMC series. In this first pandemic-proofed peek at the as-yet-untitled beginning of the end of The Walking Dead, our group of captured heroes — Eugene (Josh McDermitt), King Ezekiel (Khary Payton), Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), and Princess (Paola Lazaro) — are grilled by the white-armored soldiers of the Commonwealth.

"We're shooting [Season 11 episodes] one and two right now, it's a two-part episode, a two-part premiere. What can I say? It's going back to [being] scary, it's scary," Walking Dead writer-producer Jim Barnes told the Talk Dead to Me podcast after the start of filming in February. "We're making a concerted effort to put that back into, especially these first two or three, and actually all throughout [the season]. We're exploring things and doing things that I haven't seen done on the show before, which is really exciting. Just different set pieces and locations, and the fact that we're pulling it off during the pandemic is a testament to the crew in Georgia, it's incredible. It's big, I think I can say that."

After airing six pared-down bonus episodes extending Season 10 from 16 to 22 episodes — the first chapters to be filmed during the pandemic under sometimes limiting health and safety protocols — executive producer and showrunner Angela Kang promised the final season would get back to "our usual scope and scale that people are used to."

"We'll start seeing more stories again like the first episode — it's got everybody on earth in the episode. And tons of zombies and lots of action and fun and intrigue, and locations we've never seen, and things like that," Kang recently told EW. "So just stylistically, there will be a change from these six [episodes] that we just watched back into our normal season."

Along with the looming final confrontation between new neighbors Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), in Season 11 "we'll be dealing with the new group that our foursome of Eugene, Ezekiel, Princess, and Yumiko ran across and that starts to open up their world in bigger and unexpected ways."

"Then of course we've got to see that Connie is still alive at the end of episode 16, so we still got that thread out there to deal with," Kang teased about the missing but soon to return survivor played by Lauren Ridloff. "We've got some great stories at Alexandria, as they're dealing with the aftermath of this Whisperer war and things start to amp up even further. Then it all keeps rolling from there."

Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD. The Final Season of The Walking Dead premieres Sunday, August 22, on AMC.

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