‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Producer Details What to Expect from Series

The premiere of AMC’s The Walking Dead companion series, Fear The Walking Dead, is less than a month away. The two shows may both be set in the same universe, but producer Dave Erickson makes it clear that fans should expect Fear to stand on its own.

Erikson spilled tons of details about the show to The Hollywood Reporter at this year’s Television Critics Association’s summer press tour, including the main theme of the show, whether or not anyone is safe, and more.

On whether or not Fear will have the same anyone-can-go vibe as TWD:

I don’t want to get too specific in terms of body count because I believe ultimately I would never set up and drop someone just for the purpose of setting up and dropping them. Anybody can be eaten at any time; it can happen to anyone. No one is safe, but I also have some specific arcs in my head that will probably protect certain people. I worked on Sons of Anarchy, and sometimes you have to kill your darlings. When you’re going to kill a major character, you need to have laid the track for it. There are certain deaths that I have in my head that wouldn’t be coming until much later in the show, but until we get up and running and we see how everything is developing, it’s hard to say.

On the show’s central theme:

For us, it’s actually one of the reasons why Los Angeles was so important to us. It’s very much about identity and reinvention. The thing about California, or L.A. specifically, is that it is a place where many people — aside from the native Angelenos — go to in order to rebuild, reinvent or bury what’s in their past. Many of our characters, as we will come to discover, have gone through some very unsavory things — histories that they try to bury. With the onset of the apocalypse, they’re going to have choices to make as to whether they can tap into the darker sides of themselves things that they tried to distance themselves from in order to survive. They also end up going back to the quotidian of it.

On how bad things will be by the end of the first season:

I wouldn’t say that we end the season at the exact same point where Rick wakes up, but it’ll loosely be in that time frame. Things will have gone very bad by the end of season one.

You can read more about what Erickson revealed here.

Fear The Walking Dead premieres on AMC August 23 at 9 p.m.

Photo Credit: AMC