‘Walking Dead’ Showrunner Tells Us How Season 9 Plays With Time: World ‘Is Starting to Degrade’

It sounds like the apocalypse is getting worse

Walking Dead
Photo Credit: Gene Page/AMC

Since AMC released key art for Season 9 of “The Walking Dead” last week, fans are in a frenzy trying to decode everything from the helicopter in the background to the crumbling Capitol building. TheWrap caught up with the zombie drama’s new showrunner Angela Kang ahead of San Diego Comic-Con to see how much we could get her to decode for us.

Kang previously confirmed that Season 9 will feature a time jump, just like in the comics, though exactly how long it has been since the conclusion of All Out War remains a mystery. Kang told TheWrap that Season 9 will signal “a new chapter of the show,” and added, “we are jumping ahead with time and playing with time in [Season 9].”

Not only does Season 9 look more closely at the relationships between our favorite characters like Rick, Maggie, Daryl and Carol, but between new characters that will be introduced.

“There will be some intriguing new people that our people run across,” she said.

She also suggested that time will play a role outside of the characters, new or old. We have to remember that the “Walking Dead” universe is an apocalyptic one, and humanity’s demise will start to show.

Kang said that something the key art is supposed to hint at is “just how much the world around them is starting to degrade, like you know, the man-made things of the world. The buildings, the infrastructure, it’s all changing and nature is kind of taking back over in some ways, and that’s going to create a lot of interesting challenges for our people to overcome in the course of the season.”

That degradation might challenge our idea of the communities seen on the series so far. “We’re going to be looking a lot at what it means to have a civilization,” Kang said.

Fans will also get to see characters interacting in “different combinations … and tell stories with people who maybe hadn’t had as many scenes with each other,” she said.

“We want to show what happens to people over time, the ways in which they change and grow,” Kang said. And yes, this goes deeper than Rick’s hair cut. “We want to look at these, like, very long-standing relationships between the characters who are now all so, so different from when we first met them.”

“The Walking Dead” returns to AMC with Season 9 this fall.  

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