Meet The Characters For The Walking Dead's Upcoming Spin-Off

The upcoming spin-off for The Walking Dead keeps getting more alive by the day. After AMC announced a pilot order back in September, character descriptions for the cast have now surfaced. Are they as intriguing as the ones we know and love on The Walking Dead? Let’s take a look.

According to TVLine, the series will apparently follow two families and an additional survivor: Sean Cabrera and his son Cody, Nancy Tompkins and her two children Nick and Ashley, and a lone wolf by the name of Andrea (don't worry: it's a different Andrea). Sean is described as a Latino male in his 40’s “trying to do right by everyone in his life,” while his teenage son, Cody, is full of rebellion. The Tompkins, on the other hand, seem like they’ll add a bit of dysfunction. Nancy looks like “the girl next door” with an edge, and her children are opposites from each other in the sense that the son Nick doesn’t want to flee, but the daughter Ashley wants to “get out of dodge.” As far as Andrea goes, she has “retreated to the outskirts of the city to recover after a horrible marriage.”

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Sounds like a wonderful dose of conflict! It raises a couple of questions, and some of them we already have an idea about. First off, in which time period is the show going to take place? Rumor has it that the show is set to be a prequel to The Walking Dead, and it’s definitely not going to take place in the same city as our TWD stars. “It’s a really different location with completely different people, so we are going to see an entirely different corner of the Walking Dead world,” series creator Robert Kirkman told IGN last year. If it’s a prequel, it’ll be an interesting angle to see the characters in their regular way of living before everything goes to hell. Also, how will all of the characters end up together, and is there any possibility that there could be some crossover with The Walking Dead guys?

Next page: Can a Walking Dead spin-off be successful?

It’s incredibly ambitious to order a spin-off when the main show is on top of its game - season five premieres this weekend, and it has already been renewed for season six. Is there any chance that the new show can turn out to be a total dud? Take a look at Pretty Little Liars: the big time ABC Family teen drama tried their luck with a spin-off in the same universe by the name of Ravenswood. It only lasted a sad ten episodes before it was axed by the network for low ratings. If TWD prequel turns out completely awful, it might just put an ugly stain on the show’s legacy.

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However, the difference between The Walking Dead and Pretty Little Liars is not only the fact that one show has zombies that eat people’s faces, but that The Walking Dead has a world that’s incredibly rich with lore, and its got a huge potential for exploration. The Walking Dead comic book is 132 issues and eleven years deep into production, and while the show shares similarities to it, there are plenties of roads the comic has gone down that the show has never touched. But one of the coolest additions to the The Walking Dead universe is its video game. Developed by Telltale Games, The Walking Dead has been made into an episodic graphic-novel-like adventure game, with a story that’s absolutely brilliant. Its got its own set of characters with the same amount of TWD’s show’s drama, and Kirkman has been offering his insight for the title that just wrapped up its second season.

I guess the moral of the story is: as long as Kirkman is involved, it’s bound to be a success. Luckily, he’ll be involved just as much as he is with its main counterpart, along with co-writer and executive producer Dave Erickson. It’s natural to be skeptical of something that appears to only be striking while the iron’s hot, but the network appears to have full intention on not diminishing The Walking Dead’s name. “We’ll take our time, and we’ll do it right,” network chief of AMC Chris Collier told Vulture. The Walking Dead spin-off is expected to give us a scare sometime in 2015, but for now, we can breathe easy knowing the production is in good hands.