The Walking Dead’s Story Will Continue in Daryl and Carol Spinoff

The Walking Dead is ending with its eleventh season but will live on, in a manner of speaking, in a stripped-down spinoff focused on Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride). The sequel series, created by chief content officer Scott Gimple and Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang, is described as a “different show with a different tone” and is believed to follow the zombie apocalypse survivors as they hit the road and head west. Due out in 2023, the untitled Daryl/Carol spinoff may use concepts that could have appeared in the mothership series if it continued past its 24-episode final season.

“There are ways the story, of course, was going to continue to keep going,” Gimple told Insider. “But it is going to continue to keep going with Daryl and Carol. It’s going to be a different show with a different tone, but the story of that corner of The Walking Dead, in some ways, it continues to go through them.”

Daryl and Carol are already the only two remaining characters who appeared in the main show’s first season. Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and Morgan Jones (Lennie James) are still alive but have been away from The Walking Dead for years, both of them now situated elsewhere in TWD Universe.

In addition to their decade-long tenure on The Walking Dead, Daryl and Carol were singled out for a spinoff because the characters lend themselves to a “super interesting” story.

“Angela and I have been working on a story for a while, and there’s just a very super interesting story there,” Gimple said.

The Walking Dead‘s tenth season premiere, scripted by Kang, hinted at that story when Daryl and Carol mulled over journeying to New Mexico to “see who’s left.” The pair circle back to that conversation in the upcoming tenth season finale, “A Certain Doom,” amid a final battle with Beta (Ryan Hurst) and the Whisperers.

“There’s some seeds being planted, I would say,” Gimple teased of the Greg Nicotero-directed Season 10 finale premiering October 4 on AMC.

Kang has been with The Walking Dead since its second season in 2011, where Daryl and Carol first grew close during a desperate search for Carol’s missing daughter Sophia (Madison Lintz). Following the final 30 episodes of The Walking Dead still to air through late 2022, Kang will serve as showrunner on the Daryl/Carol Spinoff scheduled for release in 2023.

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