‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Executive Producer David Erickson Shares New Photos, Calls ‘The Walking Dead Spin-Off’ A ‘Family Drama’

As August gets closer and closer, so does the premiere of AMC’s newest zombie drama, Fear the Walking Dead. With the series only a month away from airing, more photos of the cast have been released, along with some additional insight from David Erickson.

The images, released by Entertainment Weekly, show three cast members in action, including Alycia Debnam-Carey, Kim Dickens, and Cliff Curtis. Debnam-Carey, who is playing a teenager named Alicia, is shown in one photo standing alone on top of some empty bleachers. Her mother, Madison, played by Dickens, is depicted in another image staring off into a room. Madison is a widowed mom who works as a counselor at a local high school.

Curtis’ character is shown in the last image talking on a cell phone and looking very thoughtful into the distance. Curtis plays a high school teacher named Travis who is also Madison’s boyfriend.

With the show focusing on Madison and her family, Erickson talked about how he really wanted to establish the core of the family in the first season. “Ultimately, it’s a family drama,” Erickson revealed to EW.

“One of the things that Robert [Kirkman] and I discussed from the very beginning was, we’re starting a little earlier in the apocalypse. And what that allowed us to do in the pilot and season 1 is establish our core family, establish the problems and the conflicts that they have, and really let that be the initial world that we live in.”

Fear the Walking Dead is a companion series to AMC’s The Walking Dead. While both shows are based on the same zombie apocalypse, Fear the Walking Dead, focuses on the events that happened while Rick Grimes was in a coma. This means the new show will delve into the very beginning of the zombie outbreak, which was entirely left out of The Walking Dead.

Speaking of the zombie outbreak, Erickson went on to discuss how the dysfunctional family setting is a way for the show to filter everything else that happens in the zombie apocalypse.

“And we layer in the onset of the apocalypse, we layer in our first walkers, but it’s really an effort to exacerbate the problems that already exist with Kim Dickens’ character and Cliff Curtis’ character and their sort of dysfunctional blended family. It’s really filtering the apocalypse through that.”

The first season of Fear the Walking Dead is set to premiere in August on AMC.