Gale Anne Hurd on The Walking Dead, Fired Writers

(SPOILER WARNING!) Season one’s finale ended with a bang: the blowing up of the CDC. “I think the final episode is really about the nexus between hope and dispair,” Hurd says. “Rick, certainly, is still a leader. He still has hope for himself and for his family, but everyone who survived has moments of despair. I think it’s part and parcel of the human condition, which is magnified in any kind of catastrophe, natural or otherwise. But I think there’s always hope. There’s hope that human society can regroup and build something and that they’ll find a safe haven. With the CDC, it was really about our characters being in Atlanta, so that would be the place you would go to hope to find answers about the outbreak. Instead what they end up with is even more questions, few answers—that it was global—and they’re left wondering if there’s anyone anywhere still working on a cure. Since Robert Kirkman is writing the series of graphic novels that never ends, he doesn’t have an end-point where everything is wrapped up, so I think that’s the way we’re approaching this as well. It’s a journey, both a physical journey, as well as a character journey.”

Many fans of the comic were surprised by how quickly the show veered away from Kirkman’s stories. “Well, Kirkman is a full partner in all of this, in every discussion in the envisioning of the first six episodes, and he very much wanted to be able to surprise fans who think they know where things are going, think they know exactly when something is going to happen—a particular event,” Hurd notes. “But then you also just have to adapt the underlying material for a different medium and a different audience, which overlaps the comic book audience, but is not just exclusive to it. That was something that was planned from the very beginning when we realized that we were going to go to series. Our intention has always been to follow the path that the comics have blazed, to make detours off the path, but always to rejoin at some point.”



The second season hasn’t been pitched to AMC yet and, right now, the structure and story for year two are still being worked out. And while they’re hoping to have THE WALKING DEAD back in the fall, they aren’t going to rush things. “I’d rather have it right than fast,” she offers. “Or [as] I generally put it, I’d rather have it right than right now. I think that anyone who’s a fan of the show would agree with that.”

And as for those stories about Darabont firing the entire WALKING DEAD writing staff? “I don’t understand! I don’t understand journalism where no one has to check their facts or talk to anybody and something is simply published and people take it as gospel. Because we didn’t have a two-season order going in, all of the writers were able to and did sell and set up other projects. That’s the way it works in television. Some pilots have gone to script and we have to wait to see if those scripts have been picked up to pilot. That all happens in January and there are some that have chosen to move on to showrun their own projects. But that’s typical. And absolutely there will be writers back who were on the first season. It’s just very strange. You notice that nobody was quoted in the original story. No one was even contacted. This is all quite unusual and I really don’t know where people got their information, but it wasn’t from any of the principals.”

Source: fangoria