Last week during The Walking Dead holiday special (available on AMC+), Scott Gimple (the architect of The Walking Dead universe) revealed that he was developing a The Walking Dead comedy spin-off. Assuming it gets the greenlight, it would join The Walking Dead universe along with the two existing spin-offs, Fear the Walking Dead and The World Beyond, in addition to the Carol and Daryl spin-off that’s expected to launch at the end of The Walking Dead and The Walking Dead anthology series.
“We are working on a straight Walking Dead comedy right now,” Gimple said on the holiday special. “We’re not making fun of our world,” he assures, “but it’s just more of a comedic take on the world.”
This could absolutely work! As a lifelong fan of the zombie genre, a good zomcom is exactly what The Walking Dead universe needs. They could go in a number of directions. If it’s a roving band of characters, they could go with a Zombieland style comedy led by Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan. If they want to return again to the initial outbreak, they could use Shaun of the Dead as inspiration and use, perhaps, Jerry and Ezekiel as the anchors for a buddy comedy.
What might be most interesting, however, is to set a half-hour sitcom in the world of The Walking Dead along the lines of what WandaVision is doing for Disney+ and the MCU. The TWD world has already established civilizations that operate similarly to our modern world, so there’s no reason AMC could not situate a comedy inside one of those civilizations.
Obviously, a zombie comedy would not be unique to television. Santa Clarita Diet did it best, but that’s not a route that The Walking Dead could take (the undead can operate fairly normally in that world, as long as they are well fed). More likely, Scott Gimple would go the Z Nation route, which is to say: The Walking Dead as a dark, low-key comedy. It’d basically be The Walking Dead but with more one-liners, a lot more elated celebrations after zombie kills, and instead of one Negan, it’d be an entire cast of Negan types.
Now that is a show fans would love to see.
(Via CBR)