(Spoilers from The Walking Dead will be found below.)
A new teaser for The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live (starring Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira as Rick and Michonne) actually looks much better than I imagined it would look, given the lovey, dovey vibe stressed in initial promo images. This spinoff should arrive sometime in 2024, following the success of Dead City and the upcoming Daryl In Paris, both of which have already been renewed for second seasons.
However, we almost wouldn’t have received a Rick Grimes spinoff at all, or even much of Rick, if co-creator Robert Kirkman had originally gotten his way. Unlike with the comics (his own comics, mind you), Kirkman initially thought it would be amazing to make Rick bite the dust on TV. This obviously didn’t happen, and I am further convinced that Rick Grimes cannot be killed. I mean, he somehow survived the below scenario and kept living after un-impaling himself, no less, albeit with the wrong kind of help.
We were nearly deprived of this moment, too! Still, yeah, Kirkman admitted (during this past weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con) that he was a “lunatic” who wanted to kill off a beloved (although bad-decision-making) character. Via Entertainment Weekly:
“With Walking Dead, I was much younger and much more reckless,” Kirkman told the audience. “I was an absolute lunatic. I would get in the writers’ room and be like, ‘Kill Rick Grimes today! I don’t care! It’ll be funny! People will freak out, and it’ll be fun!’ The writers were like, ‘Robert, you’re crazy. We can’t do that.’ But any time there were big changes in The Walking Dead, that’s what excited me.”
I do wonder, though, how Kirkman wanted to do it. That first horse scene would have been the funniest in retrospect, but the entire trajectory of the show would have been altered. Who would we have seen Jon Bernthal’s character go nuts with jealousy against, after all? That had to happen, as did the flashbacks of their once-wonderful friendship. Yet it seems that someone talked Kirkman off that story ledge, and over a decade later, we’re about to see Rick Grimes and Michonne return with their own show (I hope she saves his ass several times) within the next year.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)