‘The Walking Dead’ won’t return with new episodes until October, as it has in previous seasons, but this year AMC is getting a jump on things and offering fans something to satisfy their zombie-like hunger a few months early.  Come August, the network will roll out with ‘Fear the Walking Dead,’ a companion series that takes place before original series focusing on a group of ordinary people, living in a normal world as the zombie outbreak begins.  In the original series, main character Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) wakes up from a coma after his section of the world has already been overrun.

The focal character of ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ is Madison, a high school guidance counselor played by Kim Dickens.  She is surrounded by her kids the straight-laced Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) and drug addict Nick (Frank Dillane) and her fiancé, a teacher at the same high school, named Travis (Cliff Curtis).  Also in the mix are Travis’ ex-wife Liza (Elizabeth Rodriguez) and their resentful son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie).

Showrunner Dave Erickson discusses the new show by saying:

“Ultimately, it’s a family drama.  One of the things that Robert [Kirkman] and I discussed from the very beginning was, we’re starting a little earlier in the apocalypse. And what that allowed us to do in the pilot and season 1 is establish our core family, establish the problems and the conflicts that they have, and really let that be the initial world that we live in. And we layer in the onset of the apocalypse, we layer in our first walkers, but it’s really an effort to exacerbate the problems that already exist with Kim Dickens’ character and Cliff Curtis’ character and their sort of dysfunctional blended family. It’s really filtering the apocalypse through that.”

No zombies, but three new pictures have emerged to give you a bit of an idea of what to expect of the living (for now) cast.

First is Kim Dickens as Madison:

Cliff Curtis as Travis:

Alycia Debnam-Carey as Alicia:

Scary huh?  Okay not really, but at least they’re… ominous.  Right?

Are you curious to see what life was like before you could potentially be eaten at any minute?  Do you think the quality of ‘The Walking Dead’ can be carried over to a spinoff?

Source: Entertainment Weekly