The Walking Dead Producers Have a “Good Sense” of How the Show Ends With Season 11

The Walking Dead executive producer and showrunner Angela Kang has a “good sense” of how the zombie drama’s eleventh and final season will ultimately conclude — an ending that will take detours from creator Robert Kirkman’s comic book finale. Kirkman finished the zombie saga after 193 issues in July 2019, and after Sunday’s Season 10 finale, just 30 episodes remain until the end of The Walking Dead. Producers are now working towards fleshing out the conclusion to the series, which begins airing its expanded 24-episode final season in late 2021 for a late 2022 wrap-up on AMC.

“I think so,” Kang told Entertainment Weekly when asked if producers know what the ending looks like. “I’ve got a good sense and, obviously, we have Robert Kirkman’s comic book as our blueprint. So there’s stuff from there that we want to play with, but everything on the show can sometimes take a winding journey.”

Kang continued, “And it’s like we’ve gone into a parallel universe with some of the characters from the comic, so we have to do some original stuff along the way that hopefully will be really cool. I’ve got an idea, but we haven’t yet really started working that out.”

In November, Kang told The Hollywood Reporter that Kirkman advised ways the television show could continue past the comic book’s ending. Kirkman said this past July he didn’t leave many ideas unused before finishing his book but noted that “there’s a lot of implied story in the final issue,” material that could find its way into the show.

“He was like, ‘You see what I did there? You could go down this path, or this path, or this path, or this path, there’s a story.’ So I think that there’s a lot of iterations that it could take for the story, and it’s that way by design,” Kang told THR. “Robert was done writing the comic, but that doesn’t necessarily mean an end for the show in the same way that the comic ended. Because that’s not even necessarily what he intended, so it’s just an interesting thing for us.”

Now in its endgame, The Walking Dead Season 11 kicks off with the introduction of a new civilization from the comic book. Characters from this group will make their first appearance in the Season 10 finale, “A Certain Doom,” premiering Sunday, October 4, on AMC.

Kang is now overseeing the six all-new Season 10 episodes planned to air on AMC early next year. These episodes will explore the aftermath of the Whisperer War and have been designed for safe filming amid the pandemic.