Fear the walking dead theme song series#
Once Madison and Nick disappeared from the picture, the new core cast members outnumbered the three holdovers, who didn’t even appear in the Season 4 premiere until its final few seconds.Īs I wrote at the time, Fear felt for one episode like a promising blank slate, and while the franchise’s history made me skeptical that the series could sustain that sense of freedom, the episodes since that time double down on breaking new ground for both Fear and the franchise.
The new co-showrunners also brought in new blood (with more on the way), led by Garret Dillahunt as lovestruck lawman John Dorie, Jenna Elfman as John’s skittish but beloved Laura, and Maggie Grace as former war correspondent Althea, or Al. Chambliss and Goldberg also decided to kill off Fear’s two most central characters, Madison (Kim Dickens, who didn’t want to leave) and Nick (Frank Dillane, who asked off the series), which left Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) as the sole remaining member of the Clark-Manawa clan - which had numbered five when Fear began - and Strand (Colman Domingo) and Luciana (Danay Garcia) as her sole surviving companions. Part of that variety involved making cast changes: The Walking Dead’s Morgan (Lennie James), who had starred in Gimple-written episodes including “Clear” and “Here’s Not Here,” crossed over, which meant writing in a two-year jump to bring the prequel spinoff into temporal alignment with its antecedent series. Leaning on what has worked in the past, I don’t think it works after nine years. And after all these years, that’s what’s so critical. “The anxiety never ends,” Gimple says, while adding, “New voices allow for new stories.
Fear the walking dead theme song tv#
Steering a series, Gimple says by phone, is a “triple full-time job” that sometimes benefits from a tag team, and so when AMC asked him whom he had in mind, he recalls, “I said those two guys instantly.”Ĭhambliss ( Dollhouse, The Vampire Diaries) and Goldberg ( Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, FlashForward), who are veteran writers and producers of genre shows, were fans of Robert Kirkman’s comics as well as the TV series that spawned Fear, and over the phone, Chambliss says that he and Goldberg were eager to embrace The Walking Dead universe’s capacity for “larger-than-life characters” to “have these very emotional stories against this fantastical genre background.” To do that, though, they wanted to depict that universe differently than Fear had to that point, which involved some amount of risk. Or, as it turned out, two: Gimple had previously collaborated with Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg on non– Walking Dead projects, and the two prospective hires had worked together as producers of Once Upon a Time. In response, Walking Dead showrunner Scott Gimple - who would soon relinquish his own showrunner role after eight seasons to take over as chief content officer for the Walking Dead franchise - joined Fear as an executive producer and helped oversee the search for a replacement showrunner. Season 3 showrunner Dave Erickson stepped down from the show and transitioned to a multiyear development deal with AMC. The break between seasons 3 and 4 was a time of turmoil for Fear. The drastic restructuring seems to have had the intended effect: After suffering steep declines in Fear’s second and third seasons, the ratings have stabilized (and even slightly rebounded) this year.Īttempting to start fresh in Season 4 was an even taller order for Fear, but the spinoff, which was recently renewed for a fifth season and returned from a hiatus on Sunday for the second half of Season 4, has made the makeover work, morphing into a weirder, wilder, and more adventurous show that stands apart from - and in some ways surpasses - the franchise flagship. Saddled with dwindling ratings and an indistinct identity at the end of its third season, The Walking Dead’s less celebrated descendant embarked on an ambitious reboot that tried to do for Fear what critically acclaimed course corrections had done for HBO’s The Leftovers and AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire in their second seasons. The redesigned intro was just the first indication of a comprehensive overhaul that extended to every aspect of the show, from the creative team to the cast to the visual style, storytelling approach, and episode structure. “It feel like I’m watching Fear the Walking Dead.” For the stewards of the series, though, changing what watching Fear feels like was the idea.
“It feels so out of place,” one YouTube commenter said. For some longtime Fear fans, the new look was jarring.