Jeffrey Dean Morgan Call Out Fans, Daryl’s Show Gets New Showrunner

It’s a little bit…chaotic in the Walking Dead universe right now, especially if you’re a fan trying to sort through what’s going on in the wake of some recent announcements. A lot has happened in just the past few days alone, so let’s go through it all.

• TVLine reported that Carol had left the Daryl and Carol Walking Dead spin-off that was announced years ago and supposed to star both Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride after the main series ends with its last string of season 11 episodes. The TVLine report said Carol being cut was a “creative” decision.
• AMC then came out and clarified that it was Melissa McBride who decided not to keep going with the series, because she did not want to relocate to Europe which is where the show was filming, something else we learned for the first time, and a first for The Walking Dead universe as a whole. Recent developments in spin-off TWD: World Beyond indicate there are “fast zombies” that have evolved over there.
• Melissa McBride’s exit then angered a whole lot of fans, and some started taking to Norman Reedus’s social accounts to lambast the actor because they believed her leaving was somehow his fault. That inspired Negan actor, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, starring in his own post-TWD spin-off to call out fans for how badly they were treating his friend Reedus, and that he had nothing to do with this at all:

• He goes on to say that rarely do actors have the power to pick things like filming locations and they can really only say yes or no when the concept is presented. In this case, Norman said yes, Melissa said no.
• As a capstone to this, we just learned that Angela Kang is no longer the showrunner of the Daryl and Carol series as she was supposed to be previously. Now that it’s just the Daryl show, it also has gotten a new showrunner in the form of David Zabel, while Kang will move to be an executive producer only. Zabel mostly recently worked on Stumptown, and while he’s a longtime fixture in television, has seemingly no past history with The Walking Dead, producing, directing, writing, anything.

The Daryl series will no doubt require some rewrites now that Carol is gone, and the show is supposed to shoot this summer in Europe to likely premiere in 2023. There’s also an open question if any existing Walking Dead cast member may make the move to Europe instead of Melissa McBride, but we haven’t heard anything about that yet.

So yeah, a lot going on, and a lot of it does not seem great. But regardless, definitely don’t harass Norman Reedus, Angela Kang, Melissa McBride or any of them over this, which should go without saying.

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