Why The Walking Dead Spinoffs Are Six Episodes

In 2010, The Walking Dead debuted with a six-episode first season, which cabler AMC followed with a 13-episode second season in 2011. By 2012, after record-breaking ratings, the Breaking Bad and Mad Men network ordered 16 episodes of The Walking Dead, splitting the third season into two eight-episode blocks. The 16-episode format would continue until the flagship show’s expanded eleventh season: a three-part, 24-episode final season aired over two years. In 2023, AMC’s Walking Dead Universe continues with a two-part, 12-episode eighth and final season of Fear the Walking Dead and two new spinoffs consisting of six episodes each: Dead City and Daryl Dixon. 

The decision to return to six-episode seasons “was more of an AMC thing,” TWD Universe chief content officer Scott M. Gimple told Collider. “But to tell you the truth, it really is also a 2023 thing, where it’s telling stories in a different cadence. It’s telling stories to be consumed in a very different way.”

With the entertainment industry’s pivot to streaming and the success of shorter seasons and mini-series, Gimple said abbreviated seasons “actually pushed us to tell stories in a very different way, which I think is a very good thing, after 12 years.”

Gimple added: “I’m a dinosaur. Considering The Walking Dead Universe and The Walking Dead storytelling in a very different way has been really rewarding and really interesting, and thank goodness, it’s given us different ways to go about it.”

Asked if future spinoffs or future seasons of coming spinoffs would consist of six episodes, Gimple answered,”I’ll just say that, right now, these first seasons are six episodes. Things might change after that. We’re still seeing about that. The Walking Dead, in its first season, was six episodes, and then things changed, obviously.”

Fear the Walking Dead debuted with six episodes in 2015 before expanding to 15 and later 16-episode seasons. Tales of the Walking Dead, an episodic anthology spinoff, premiered last year with an inaugural season of six self-contained episodes. Another spinoff, the limited series The Walking Dead: World Beyond, aired two 10-episode seasons between 2020 and 2021.

The Walking Dead: Rick & Michonne, reuniting Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira), arrives on AMC and AMC+ with six episodes in 2024. Dan McDermott, President of Entertainment and AMC Studios, has said that the cabler spends “a lot of time focusing on how much is the right amount” in terms of episodic Walking Dead content. 

“The last couple years, we’ve had 16 episodes of The Walking Dead, 16 episodes of Fear of the Walking Dead, 10 episodes of Walking Dead: World Beyond. That’s 42 episodes of television. That’s a lot,” McDermott previously told EW. “Going forward, the Rick and Michonne show is six episodes. The Daryl Dixon show is going to be six episodes. The Maggie and Negan show is going to be six episodes. We have Tales of the Walking Dead. So you’re actually going to see fewer hours of Walking Dead content on our platforms.”

Fear the Walking Dead Season 8 premieres May 14th on AMC and AMC+; The Walking Dead: Dead City, starring Lauren Cohan’s Maggie and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan, debuts in June, followed by the Norman Reedus-led The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon later in 2023. Stay tuned to ComicBook/TWD and follow @NewsOfTheDead for more TWD Universe coverage.