AMC is currently shooting The Walking Dead spin-off Cobalt, and Robert Kirkman – creator of The Walking Dead comics and executive producer on the show – has spoken about how the new series differs from the original in an interview with Entertainment Weekly:
“I will say that this is going to be a show about family. But it’s going to be a show about a different type of family that we haven’t explored in The Walking Dead thus far. So what we’re trying to do with The Walking Dead spinoff is keep the story as familiar as possible for people that love The Walking Dead, so you’ll get the kind of things that you expect from a Walking Dead story. But, at the same time, we’ll want to tell these stories in a completely different way with completely different people in a completely different setting that’s going to make for a fundamentally different show. I think the look and feel of The Walking Dead spinoff is going to be startlingly different.”
Kirkman then talked about how you could watch the new show without having watched The Walking Dead, stating that: “We want it to be a new show that can stand on its own. You could watch The Walking Dead spinoff if you’ve never watched an episode of The Walking Dead and get a really great, rich, fulfilling experience out of it. It has to be a show that can stand on its own. I think that’s what we’ve accomplished, and we start filming in a couple of days. I’m really excited.”
Finally Kirkman revealed that no characters from the comics would appear in the new show.”It’s Los Angeles. It’s a corner of the world that we have never explored in the comic book series. So, theoretically, something like this could be happening in Los Angeles in the comic book series, but we don’t show you this area of the country in the comic book series. So it fits within that world, but it is all new characters, all new events and all kinds of crazy stuff.”
Cobalt stars Cliff Curtis, Frank Dillane, Kim Dickens and Alycia Debnam Carey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszH_jfuJoo8HCG1-lGjvfH2F&v=VuCo68oUI6U&feature=player_embedded
Originally published January 17, 2015. Updated April 13, 2018.
