Like the shambling corpses it will feature, The Walking Dead spin-off World Beyond is coming at us slowly, and now it’s coming even slower. AMC has announced that the series, a two-season special event show, has changed its premiere date from April 12, 2020 to a more nebulous “later this year.”
The Walking Dead: World Beyond is moving its premiere date from Sunday April 12th to later this year.
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— TWDWorldBeyond (@TWDWorldBeyond) March 20, 2020
The World Beyond delay might seem odd considering the amount of television watching and streaming going on amid quarantine. The assumption would be that this would be a great time to premiere a new series for people to veg out to, especially since the first season of the show has already finished filming. However, Deadline reports that the series was still being worked on in post-production and that work has had to stop thanks to safety concerns and company closures caused by the coronavirus.
The report also notes that AMC, and almost every other network, has had to stop production on most of its shows that were set to premiere in the second half of 2020. The station may be delaying the series so that it can have some sort of content for the second part of the year. That would please advertisers as well, who are pulling back from ad spending right now as coronavirus stops people from shopping. Having a new series ready to go and draw in eyes once the crisis has passed would mean having prime time slots to sell when new TV content will be scarce.
There may also be an issue with the content of the show, though that seems unlikely. The series is about a virus taking out most of society, and World Beyond specifically focuses on the long-term effects of the zombie apocalypse for those who grew up in it. With the series following a group of teens who leave their protective enclave to go out into a world they’ve never known, there could be just a few too many similarities to current real life for AMC’s taste.
Aliyah Royale, Alexa Mansour, Annet Mahendru, Nicolas Cantu, Hal Cumpston, Nico Tortorella, and Julia Ormond star in The Walking Dead: World Beyond.
Published: Mar 23, 2020 11:30 am