Tales of the Walking Dead Showrunner Wrote a Musical Episode

By Cameron Bonomolo

A Walking Dead musical episode didn't hit the right notes for Tales of the Walking Dead, the new anthology series premiering August 14 on AMC. Scott M. Gimple, who developed the spinoff as Chief Content Officer of AMC's Walking Dead Universe, revealed the long-running zombie franchise was weighing a musical installment as far back as 2019. In 2020, Gimple said the anthology spinoff was considering different formats and mediums — including musical and animated episodes — to "surprise people every week with what they will be getting." While the show's first season will experiment with tones and genres, you'll have to stay tuned for the first-ever Walking Dead musical.  

"We did come up with a musical episode, that just for production reasons was going to be a little bit too difficult to film," Tales showrunner and executive producer Channing Powell told EW. "It's written! We have a whole script for it."

Powell, who wrote episodes of The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead before taking the reins on the franchise's first anthology show, explained that a tight production schedule would have made it difficult to record songs and other musical elements (especially mid-pandemic). 

 "Should we get a season 2 or 3, I'm going to push for that one if I can," Powell said. "It lives in my heart and in my mind."

During a press conference that followed Tales' first San Diego Comic-Con panel in July, Gimple said he lobbied for the animated episode and Powell for the musical episode — "but we both lost." 

"The big thing with this show is the variety. You know, Tales from the Crypt is fairly consistent in tone," Gimple said. "This, all around, has different tones and it really offers the audience an incredible amount of variety."

Powell added she was "dying" to do the musical episode of Tales of the Walking Dead, explaining that some ideas "were so different that we kind of wanted to see how much we could push the boundaries within the world, and the tone, and how much it would still feel like The Walking Dead and please the fans of the original show and also new fans."

"We've got plans for some crazy things," Powell said, adding it was important for each of the six standalone episodes to be about "the desire to survive and the need to survive."

"Even though they are tonally very different and that was the goal — we wanted it to feel like six different pilots or six different movies," she explained. "The heart of it is still The Walking Dead." 

Featuring a cast that includes Terry Crews, Olivia Munn, Samantha Morton, Parker Posey, Anthony Edwards, Poppy Liu, Jillian Bell, Jessie T. Usher, Danielle Pineda, and Danny Ramirez, Tales of the Walking Dead is streaming now on AMC+ and premieres August 14 on AMC. 

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