It’s been a good week for fans of the popular AMC zombie horror franchise The Walking Dead. In addition to the upcoming star-studded winter holiday special and heart-stopping season one finale for the World Beyond spin-off series, seventh season of Fear The Walking Dead has just been confirmed, Deadline reports. The renewal announcement came by way of post made by the show’s official Twitter account on December 3. Fear The Walking Dead is a spin-off of the award-winning drama The Walking Dead, whose upcoming eleventh season was recently confirmed as its last.
The good news about season seven comes nearly two weeks after the airing of the midseason finale of Fear the Walking Dead‘s sixth season, as reported by Newsweek. The remaining nine episodes of the season will arrive in 2021, according to ComicBook.com interview with co-showrunner Ian Goldberg (Once Upon a Time, Dead of Summer).
Goldberg told ComicBook.com that the writers are consciously building to moment at the end of season six when all the characters who have been separated from one another come together at the shelter being constructed by Morgan Jones (Lennie James, AMC’s The Prisoner): “We’re going to continue to see how he builds that… with the ultimate goal of reuniting the family and bringing them all behind the dam wall there. Obviously, that’s a tall order, and with everybody split apart under different encampments for Virginia, it’s going to be tricky.”
Goldberg and his collaborator Andrew Chambliss (Dollhouse, Heroes) saw the fact that their ensemble of characters is physically estranged from one another as an opportunity to experiment with their storytelling methods. In an interview with Digital Spy, Goldberg discussed how he and Chambliss borrowed from the world of cinema to achieve the structure of season six: “These [episodes] really are sixteen movies. They focus on two or three characters and have their own identity, their own tone, their own world, while at the same time building to a more cumulative narrative… We’re big fans of movies and we kind of approached each episode as our Fear The Walking Dead lens on a particular movie or a particular genre.”
Chambliss admitted to ComicBook.com that he and Goldberg haven’t had any serious discussions about the inevitable conclusion of Fear The Walking Dead. “We have not had any specific conversations about when the show would end. We have our own ideas about how we think the show should conclude, but for right now, we’re just going to keep telling the stories,” he asserted.