The Walking Dead Final Season Premieres This Summer: First Teaser Released

The eleventh and final season of The Walking Dead premieres this summer on AMC. The network announced The Walking Dead‘s return with a surprise teaser released during Sunday’s extended Season 10 premiere, “Home Sweet Home,” the first of six new bonus episodes filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously expected for October 2021 after a series of production delays caused by the coronavirus, the first part of Season 11 of The Walking Dead premiering later this year will put Daryl (Norman Reedus), Maggie (Lauren Cohan), and their group of zombie apocalypse survivors on the road to the Commonwealth.

Watch the first teaser below:

Teasing a New World Order, the surprise first look reveals the interview setup of Lance Hornsby — an as-yet-revealed character from the comic books who formally introduces the survivors to the Commonwealth, a sprawling network of communities home to nearly 50,000 people. The cliffhanger ending of “A Certain Doom” in October revealed the white-armored soldiers of the Commonwealth Army, who play a key role in the upcoming extended Season 10 episode “Splinter” and beyond.

“The one episode that’s coming up, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a whole big story to be played,” showrunner Angela Kang teased during The Walking Dead Extended Season 10 Preview Special. “There’s more characters within that group to meet, but we will start to get into them a bit, get a sense of their vibe, what they’re about, through our characters’ perspective. But there’s so much more cool story to come in Season 11.”

Season 11 will release in three parts spanning 24 episodes, beginning in summer 2021 and ending in fall 2022. Filming on the final season has been underway since February 8.

“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,” writer-producer Jim Barnes told the Talk Dead to Me podcast when revealing the first details behind the final season. “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.”

New episodes of The Walking Dead extended Season 10 premiere Sundays at 9 pm ET/8c on AMC. Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD.