What keeps "The Walking Dead" moving forward? Showrunner Scott Gimple insists "love is the fuel"

Scott Gimple extends his apologies to everyone who abandoned "The Walking Dead" after the bloody seventh season premiere. He also mourned the demise of Steven Yeun's Glenn, the conscience and heart of Rick Grimes' band of survivors. What can he say, other than . . . hurt people hurt people.

"I really didn't mean to hurt you," he told me during a recent conversation we had in Pasadena, Calif., quickly adding, "but Robert [Kirkman] hurt me!"

Gimple was referring to Kirkman's long-running horror comic, where Glenn died on the page years before his fatal onscreen exit. But the audience's reaction and subsequent revolt taught him how powerfully we had connected to the franchise's most popular characters.

While the showrunner believes what he did was necessary, he still wishes "they would keep watching to see what happened and how that affected everyone and shaped the story."

Think of "The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live" as Gimple's way of making amends. The limited series resumes the love story of Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne Grimes (Danai Gurira) following their years-long separation. Like the other two spin-offs that emerged after the main series ended, this novella lasts a short but meaty six episodes — a huge switch from the original show’s orders, which stretched to 24 episodes by its final season in 2021.

They also represent a change in the way that Gimple, the franchise's chief content officer, envisions "The Walking Dead" shambling forward. These six-episode "experiments," as he calls them, veer further afield from the mothership's "survival thriller" energy, blurring the definition of what genre these stories belong to.

First came "Dead City," pairing Glenn's hardboiled widow Maggie (Lauren Cohan) with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the man who murdered him, in a quest to recover her child. "The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon" drops Norman Reedus' kindhearted outlaw biker in France to navigate a story about faith at the end of the world. "That one can feel like a French indie movie," Gimple said to me.

With "The Ones Who Live," Gimple is telling what he and Gurira recently described as an epic love story. "This is about . . . two people who are soul mates, but their souls have been a little beaten up by the world and a lot of time has passed," Gimple told reporters at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour.

It also pulls back from the original series' tight focus on inhumanity and violence, which eventually overwhelmed the plot, favoring instead a close look at what keeps us alive after the world ends. Then, and now, Gimple explains, "the fuel was love."

The showrunner expanded on the theme of love during our recent conversation, and explained why such crucial and divisive events as the one that took a massive bite out of the original show’s audience formed the basis for these sequels. He also shared his thoughts on why they could never happen again in a TV landscape that favors brief episodic orders.

This interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Here's what struck me about "Daryl Dixon" and what I've seen of "The Ones Who Live" and "Dead City." There has been this tendency with the entire zombie genre to relate it to "The Walking Dead" as it was. Because "The Walking Dead" was such a dominant force, both creatively and in the ratings, everything that has come after, or is even slightly related to the genre, has been compared to it.

Of the ones that I've seen recently, including "Daryl" and "The Ones Who Live," they've been driven less by a sense of survival than a sense of hope. And this seems to be the case, particularly after the pandemic. I'm wondering if this notion influenced the shape that this show and "Daryl" have taken.

That's interesting. I feel that hope has been integral to the show all along. Granted, it was sort of, "We can find a safe place; we can actually live. We can do more than survive; we can live." But then you get pulled down by the things you have to do to survive.

It is interesting, what you're saying. With all these shows, they're seasoned survivors. They're not necessarily worried about, "Am I going to make it?" They know they are. They've made it . . . Absolutely, it could be a function of the pandemic in the back of our heads, but I think it was more of a function of a distinctness between the three of them.

"Dead City" is very interesting because I find it to be the grittiest one, the most hard-nosed. The people are a little bit more broken. The situation between Maggie and Negan — that's not going to get fixed. It might be slightly, slightly sanded down, but it's always going to have those rough edges.

With "Daryl," you know his core is good. You know what I mean? Like, he has these people around him who right off the bat, pretty quickly care about him — and he cares about them. And that is a little sweeter, that is a little more hopeful. It's still related to a cowboy who comes to town to help everybody but has to be on his way. But is he on his way?

With Rick and Michonne, love is the fuel. That's the point. When we talk about love stories, people might think, "Oh, it's so sweet, frothy and bubbly." I think it makes things much more intense because the stakes are much higher. In the show, there are these incredibly tender moments that are reversed with awful things, then back to the tenderness after the awful things.

I don't know — I find them to be very different. I find them to have various degrees of hope. And the last thing I'll say is having hope makes things much more resonant and difficult when it doesn't look like things are going to work out. It makes it that much more painful.

Full disclosure: I was one of the people who walked away from "The Walking Dead" after Negan killed Glenn.

I'm sorry. I wish I could speak to all of you.

What would you say to all of us? Because there's a lot of us.

I mean . . .

I'm quite serious. This is an opportunity, Scott! Speak through me.

I didn't mean to hurt you. I really didn't mean to hurt you, but Robert hurt me!

The audience, in my mind, was the other survivor on the show who was going through the same things and wanted that journey of all the things they went through. Because what happened to Glenn wasn't the end of hope. It wasn't the end of light. It wasn't the end of love.

It was awful, but it was what those characters had to go through in that stage of their lives in the world. And that's what I got from the comic.

Here's why I brought that up: I feel like what brought me back to these spin-offs was a curiosity to see what the stories would look like in the wake of that moment. Were any lessons taken from that juncture or others that may have informed your approach to them?

It was such an amazing moment in time. It was something that we were building to for years, you know what I mean? We were telling 16 episodes a year, and even the cadence with which people were watching, being at a time of appointment television, so that show is a part of your schedule on a regular basis for four months. It is a part of your weekend and, for some people, one of the highlights of their week.

The power of doing that over the years, making those connections with those characters, and then some of those connections being suddenly severed? It can't happen like that today, you know what I mean?

People don't have that same relationship. They don't have that same cadence of viewing. The power of those moments or the power of those relationships for the audience, the characters, isn't the same because it isn't as long and it isn't as regular.

It was a moment for you and others that simply won't ever be replicated in television — and it was incredible to see the power of it.

That is true. I’m going to slightly rephrase that question, though: How did those defining, significant turns like Glenn’s death or equivalent developments inform your approach to these latest spin-offs? Were there any kind of emotional lessons that you took from your time with the mothership and the viewers’ reactions to those explosive moments?

Well, it is actually what we talked about: It showed just the incredible connection with the audience and that they want to see more of these characters — and they want these characters to be a part of their lives. Especially with this wave of Maggie, Negan, Daryl, Rick and Michonne, we want to honor that incredibly intense and years-long relationship with the audience.

Again, it’s a relationship that was built up in a way that you cannot with characters in 2024. These people are family to them. We want to tell great stories with them that honor that relationship.

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Are you surprised when people wonder what kind of genre “The Ones Who Live” belongs to? I don’t know if that question would have been asked 10 years ago.

It was never straight horror. It just wasn't . . . I mean, there are so many horrifying elements, but it isn't horror. I wouldn't call it an adventure story. And Rick and Michonne, that was the three of us in the room asking, what are we doing here? That's where "epic love story" came from.

But it was an interesting question because it was hard to pin down.

When you say "epic love story," people think of something like the "Odyssey." That was an epic love story about a man trying to return home to his wife.

Yes, and sweeping historical romances or historical epics. There's this big backdrop to this story and what they're doing, but right now, we're going with "epic love story." If we can dial it in even that much more and add a couple of adjectives, I think we're good.

What would you tell people about how "The Ones Who Live" speaks to where we are right now?

When love is the fuel to the things that are happening, or the challenges that we face, that can make us stronger. That can enable us to attempt to do impossible things.

I wore a shirt when we announced it that said "better together." And that's just it: We’re better together — all of us, you know. We're all split up in so many ways, but I'm certain we are all better when we're all together on things.

"The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live" airs 9 p.m. Sundays on AMC and AMC+.