‘Tales of The Walking Dead’ Showrunner Teases TWD’s Anthology “Experiment”

When you think The Walking Dead, you think big ensembles, big action, and of course: zombies. Lots and lots of zombies. But AMC’s new anthology series Tales of the Walking Dead, co-created by longtime franchise writer Channing Powell and TWD universe head honcho Scott M. Gimple, goes in the opposite direction. Instead of creating new stars, Tales brings in name actors like Terry Crews, Olivia Munn, Parker Posey, Anthony Edwards and more to tell six very different stories set in the undead apocalypse. And they’re the sorts of episodes you might not see on any of the previously aired series.

“The tone of Walking Dead is so specific that I was really excited to veer as much outside of it as I could,” Powell told Decider. “If you really want traditional Walking Dead content, then you have the flagship show, you have Fear and you have the other spin-offs that are happening. So with an anthology, I liked taking risks.”

In fact, other than one episode starring Samantha Morton as “Dee” (aka the woman who will eventually become Whisperer leader Alpha), Tales of the Walking Dead eschews the characters known throughout the world of Walking Dead in favor of new characters, and new situations.

With the premiere episode starring Crews and Munn streaming early on AMC+ (subsequent episodes will stream a week early on AMC+ starting Sunday), and the series officially debuting Sunday night on AMC, we talked to Powell about structuring the anthology, the challenges of shooting entirely new settings, and whether this really is six, one-off tales:

Decider: Broadest question possible, where did this idea start? This isn’t the first time TWD has done one-off tales or anthology style stories, but usually they’ve been web series, not a full on TV show.

Channing Powell: The idea started with Scott Gimple. I think he felt like the world really had so many places it could go, and in a series we are limited to production and characters, and you have a serialized story that you need to tell, and you can’t really bridge out from that too often. We also have the IP that we wanted to honor, so we were trying to the story that we had already set up. There are just a lot of stories outside of DC, outside of Atlanta, outside of the places that we wanted to tell, outside of the time zone and even the genre, we wanted to broaden the horizon. And I think he felt like there were a lot of stories we could tell about specific characters within the show… In different parts of the country.

This is a very different sort of thing than, say, Tales From The Crypt, which are one and done or even an American Horror Stories where the rules are bonkers every episode. This is a pretty well established world. So given those restrictions, what are the rules for what you could or could not tackle with individual stories?

They’re interesting. The rules of the universe are pretty finite. We have to abide by however the walker apocalypse happened in the flagship show. So, the rules of that that were created by Robert Kirkman in the comic book, and then enhanced by Scott Gimple. Every episode of Tales does abide by the walker apocalypse rules, because it’s really its own spin-off, and it’s not married to the flagship show in any way or any character there… We could go a little bit crazy with things. We could mix up genres and we could mix up the tone a little bit. As long as we abided by the rules of the apocalypse and how the walkers work, we were allowed to experiment beyond that.

Without getting into spoilers, having seen the first four episodes, you do take some very big swings. So what was important to you as showrunner, in terms of pushing the franchise — textually, thematically, emotionally?

I’ve written for The Walking Dead and I’ve written for Fear for so long that I was interested to see other slices of life, other slices of tone… The tone of Walking Dead is so specific that I was really excited to veer as much outside of it as I could. If you really want traditional Walking Dead content, then you have the flagship show, you have Fear and you have the other spin-offs that are happening. So with an anthology, I liked taking risks. I liked going outside of what people might be expecting of The Walking Dead and showing the world, showing the walker apocalypse in a different way as much as possible.

You’ve got name actors coming in for every episode… How did you snag all of them? Was it a cascade effect, in terms of one name signed on and that convinced a couple of others? Did it sort of happen in chunks? How do they all get brought in?

I do remember specifically for the second episode, I really was curious. I love comedy. I love dark comedy. I was really curious to see how a character like Parker Posey would fit in this world. So, I remember being very specifically geared toward that, and she was in my mind for that role. We started there, and then once that happened, we also looked at who were fans of the franchise, and who might be really interested in doing [the show]. If they couldn’t commit to a full series, doing a one-off and that’s how we came to Terry Crews, and Olivia Munn, and Jillian Bell, and Anthony Edwards… We were blown away by how lucky we got with everybody. We didn’t really think that we were going to be able to snag the people that we got. We kind of took a risk there as well, and it paid off.

When you bring in people like this, like a Terry Crews, they have a very specific personality, or you mentioned Parker Posey… So, how much back and forth in terms of the structure of the episodes was writing the episodes, bringing in these stars, and then tailoring it for them, at least a little bit?

There was a lot. We had a full deli menu of episode ideas, and there was a lot of fine tuning about what we wanted the show to be, how far we could go outside the boundaries of the world, how traditional we should stay. Ultimately, it was decided that we wanted to do a mix of both, because we didn’t want to alienate old fans, but we also wanted to bring in new fans and show people a totally different side of The Walking Dead. We ended up with three that are a little bit more traditional, and three that are a little bit more out there. And once those were honed in… Once we decided what those six episodes were going to be, I had an ideal cast list in my mind. For something like the premiere episode, we were casting Joe and I’m not sure that you would really think that Terry Crews is typically a prepper in the apocalypse, but I thought that was interesting and I really pushed for him to do it, and he was so excited. He’s such a fan of the franchise. Bless him, he jumped on board and once that was rolling, everything else fell into place, as well.

So given all that, how do you structure the season? It strikes me a little bit like trying to create an album or a mixtape in a way, so there’s a flow and a structure.

That was interesting. So, we did like I said, we decided on the three more traditional, three a little bit more out there. I’m excited to see how people respond to the out there episodes, because I don’t think they’re expecting them, especially if they’re used to watching The Walking Dead as it is. Ultimately, we wanted to do a mix of both, but in terms of air order, we wanted to give you a little bit traditional, a little bit out there, a little bit traditional, a little bit… We tried to keep it flowing in a way that was interesting and unique, but also if you gravitate towards something that’s a little bit more out there, you can wait for the next episode. If you gravitate towards something that’s a little bit more typical of The Walking Dead, you can wait for the next episode… There’s always the next episode you can watch.

Again without getting into spoilers, the Alpha episode that happens third… Was there any talk about putting that first, as a “here’s a name character, then we’re going to give you new ones”?

It was actually never going to be [first]… We talked about that being a finale, but because some of the episodes did end up being a little bit more out there, I think they wanted a touchstone in the middle of the season for Walking Dead fans so they didn’t have to wait too long to see somebody they loved.

How much of these episodes are with an eye to the future, meaning potentially seeing these characters again, assuming of course they survive, versus leaving it all on the table each episode?

Um, I didn’t close the door on any of the episodes, even if a character died. [Laughs] We tried to really create characters that we loved and that I would want to revisit again. So, in my mind, you know, none of the stories are dead for them.

Tales is not like Walking Dead where you have Alexandria, Hilltop, these very settled places with literal sets. It’s a new set every week. So, what were the challenges like there, in terms of putting this together from a production perspective?

That was actually probably the biggest challenge we faced, because building a new set every time is costly. There’s nothing existing in this world that we could use. We had to make everything up as we went along. We have such a great crew in Atlanta, Georgia, and they are so used to being able to move with The Walking Dead speed that at least they were able to bring in the knowledge of working in the walker apocalypse beforehand. So at least we had that baseline knowledge going in. But I do think that having to build a different set every basically every ten days proved to be a little bit difficult.

In the first batch of episodes, there are a number of pairs here… Pairings between characters. What was interesting to you about that in particular?

It just felt natural in the form of a franchise. It was harder to do an ensemble piece, especially because it was costly to build sets and do something new every week. We couldn’t really go too extravagant and big with any of the episodes. And because of timing and how long the episodes are, we really wanted to be able to focus on those character stories, make you fall in love with those characters, give them a beginning, a middle and an end. If we had done a little bit more of an ensemble piece, it just felt… We tried a couple of them in theory, and story, but it just felt like we weren’t giving them enough time to shine, or for the audience to get to know those characters as well.

Are we going to see any of these strings tying together in any way, or are these truly six, isolated tales?

They’re really six, isolated tales. I’m not ruling out in the future that they come together in some way, but as of now, we intended to go in with the feel of six different pilots, and what connects them all is the walker apocalypse.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Tales of the Walking Dead premieres Sunday, August 14 at 9/8c on AMC. The premiere is currently streaming early on AMC+, with subsequent new episodes premiering a week early on AMC+ on Sundays.