Nipping at the undead heels of yesterday’s teasing promo, one which featured Negan establishing some ground rules in chilling fashion, Entertainment Weekly has offered some insight into the painstaking process that AMC mapped out so as to keep The Walking Dead season 7 firmly under wraps.
Fending off heightened anticipation following the nerve-shredding finale to season 6, long-time series director and executive producer Greg Nicotero told the outlet that the production team has “gone to pretty significant lengths” to prevent any spoiler-sensitive material seeping through the cracks ahead of time.
It all comes down to AMC’s relentless drive to preserve the experience of the show, according to Nicotero, and that often means shielding The Walking Dead from the prying eyes of the public.
That scene was shot on the backlot, because we didn’t want it to be shot out in public where people can climb trees, or for telephoto lenses, to capture something. It’s unfortunate, because those people, their job is to ruin the show, and our job is to preserve the experience of the show. So we do have to spend a lot of energy and a lot of effort preserving the experience of watching the show. It’s just the way the world is right now, and it’s an unfortunate thing.
Touching base on the so-called rise of spoiler culture, later in the interview Nicotero noted that many viewers really want to go into a new episode or even season blind, and that it’s the rampant demand of the few that so often threatens to spoil the experience for the many.
Likening The Walking Dead to his own experience watching HBO’s fantasy flagship Game of Thrones, the producer noted that:
There are a lot of TV shows that I love watching. I choose not to go online and read anything about them because I still enjoy the experience of learning about it for the first time. I don’t need spoilers. I’m a huge Game of Thrones fan, as you know, and every episode took me on this amazing great journey that I relished. I loved not knowing where I was being led but willingly going there. And people that want to put spoilers out there, they’re purposely trying to ruin that experience for people.
So I really still think that the majority of viewers feel the same way I do. They don’t want to know ahead, they don’t want to know what’s going to happen. You’ll have some news outlets that will find a kernel or a sort of nugget of information and run with it, and put it out there to be the first ones to report it, but it’s just about the experience of watching any movie. You don’t want to know how it ends. It’s about the journey, it’s not only about the ending.
The Walking Dead makes its return via AMC on October 23 when Khary Payton will be joining the network’s star-studded cast as Ezekiel. And yes, Shiva is also on board.
