The Walking Dead at 10: Celebrating a TV milestone

Halloween 2020 marks 10 years of The Walking Dead as the zombie show that could

It’s hard to imagine what it was like on October 30, 2010, on the day before Halloween. The cast and crew of a zombie apocalypse series called The Walking Dead were waiting to find out if their show would find an audience on primetime network television. It was a gamble, bringing a zombie show based on a comic book to life on a network known for Mad Men and Breaking Bad, but the gamble paid off.

Now, ten years later, The Walking Dead has spawned a television franchise with two spin-offs on air and two more on the way, movies in the works and several projects coming up. There is an after show, a Twitch channel, video games and merchandise.

The Walking Dead has never been bigger.

The Walking Dead is the little zombie show that could. After six episodes in its first season, the show took off and became something that no one could foresee. It inspired other networks to adapt comic book and fantasy IP because the audience was clearly hungry for it, and it wasn’t long before Game of Thrones began its journey on HBO while zombies became more popular than ever before.

Thanks to the pandemic, the show has announced that it will be ending in 2022 after six bonus episodes and an extended season 11, but that doesn’t mean that the fun is coming to an end. Not only are two new spin-offs coming – the Carol and Daryl spin-off and the anthology Tales of the Walking Dead – but Fear the Walking Dead has hit a major stride in season 6 and TWD: World Beyond is delighting audiences with its peek inside the world beyond Alexandria.

AMC is fully committed to The Walking Dead and that means that the TWD Family can look forward to lots of TWD Universe content in the coming years. It’s rare to see a network so dedicated to a franchise, but we’ll take it.

Congratulations to the cast and crew of The Walking Dead, and here’s to another amazing 10 years!