Actors have some publicity commitments as part of their contract, but the how and what are often left to the discretion of the actor.

That point you mention about Yumiko serving as a lawyer with a relative at the CW is interesting, because couldn’t that have been Andrea? If Glen Mazzara hadn’t been a vindictive creep.

Yes, if Andrea had still been alive during the CW arc, she would most likely have gotten that storyline. The audience would've had a stronger attachment to her than a recently added support character with limited screentime and little character development. Andrea would've been one of the leads and, along with Carol and Daryl, had the longest runs on the show.

There would've been a lot for Sarah to lose in speaking up. For one, the showrunner was a creepy and vindictive man child, so he would've tried to make sure it was difficult for her to get cast in anything else. (Look at Laurie's post-TWD career... she's worked, but she hasn't been a lead or main cast.) Sarah has alluded to how misogynist TWD was many times since then and even if Laurie had the worst time of it, on a different set from the rest of the main cast, none of the women had a good time when Mazzara had the helm.

Arguing with a showrunner, especially one whom you know is a problem, is a recipe for disaster. Once a woman gets a reputation for being difficult, it's almost impossible to ever fully recover from that. I've frequently spoken on how important your reputation is and it's an industry run by men: they don't like it when you say no, or call them out on being unfair or creepy toward your friends. As an actor, you might never get a callback from an audition if casting agents, showrunners or directors have heard that you cause trouble on set. It's a high-pressure, rigidly scheduled environment and nobody wants to deal with someone with a sense of entitlement on top of an already heavy workload.

You also said that Melissa would know first if she's about to be fired, but that isn't how it always works. I worked with a woman at my job who went high up the ladder. She informed me when they were going to try and find a reason to fire me because I stood up for myself against their abuse. I knew what they were planning months before they attempted it thanks to that woman (we are not friends, we were co-workers, and she knew I was a hard worker, and she warned me) Leaks happen. Someone could have liked Melissa and let it slip to someone they trusted, and Sarah Callies could have said something. No one knows. Why do you think that isn't true?

If, "Gimple has no credibility as a writer" why is he STILL allowed to write?

See this post. He's also not actively writing: Gimple has EP credit and the right to give notes on the current TWDU shows due to his exec title of CCO. He was supposed to showrun More Tales of the Walking Dead, but that show quietly went away after it was announced. (I suspect the individual episodes were "spaghetti on the wall" to audience test different premises for a show.) The treatment and/or outlines were probably unsalvageably bad, even to AMC.

You also said that Melissa would know first if she's about to be fired, but that isn't how it always works.

It is for above-the-line in TV. We don't all work in the same space or casually bump into one another 'in the building' the way most other businesses do. For instance, AMC's offices are in NY and LA, while TWD was shot in ATL—there's a whole country in between. Studio space, production offices and set locations are also usually not within a quick walk of each other, even when they are in the same metropolitan area, which isn't always the case either.

The supervising exec (at the studio) and the showrunner are the people who know about the actors whose options aren't picked up. The former isn't on set and wouldn't be talking to any actors, informally or otherwise. They are only in regular contact with the showrunner, so unless the exec went out of their way to get Sarah's phone number to call her up to gossip about how her friend Melissa didn't get a pick-up, that's not how it happened.

Calls to and from the studio go through assistants, who schedule them, and are thus logged. That means both at the executive's office and the production manager's. Contact details directly to the actor are kept by the production company; the studio communicates via the actor's reps, not directly with an actor. It's done this way for legal protection, which probably isn't relevant in your field and the only people who actually need to reach an actor on short notice (for scheduling changes) is production staff.

Leah was always the plan, not as a midship for anyone, but as a catalyst for emotional growth. I've never been in a production meeting where anyone discussed the need for a 'midship.' That's not how emotional arcs are defined, but old school networks (and AMC) like to tease the possibility of romance if it happens to fall in their lap without a need to commit. That is, if fandom starts to ship something that wasn't planned, execs like to exploit the situation for whatever engagement they can.

The studio didn't like that a portion of the audience saw Daryl as potentially a virgin rather than a heroic loner. It isn't "manly" enough for a leading man to be seen as inexperienced. Using female minor characters (who are irrelevant to the main story arc) to show that the male hero is sexually attractive is a way of "correcting" that which doesn't take screentime away from what's important to the story and doesn't lock in any particular character trajectory.

When Angela Kang took over as showrunner, she would've looked at the long game for the main characters and how she could shade their arcs, so Leah's relevance to both Daryl and Carol's emotional arcs was conceived and broken much earlier than her actual appearance on the show. Angela would've also had to plan for the original Caryl spinoff and where both Daryl and Carol would land at their exit from the flagship show. Obviously, Daryl couldn't have a girlfriend at the Commonwealth whom he abandoned in favor of going out on the road with a different woman.

Magna's whole group was irrelevant to the overarching narrative; none of them had any real character arcs of their own and no impact on the plot. (It's easy to lift them out of the story without losing cohesion of the main storyline.) Their only real purpose beyond the subplot to service Michonne's arc was to have Yumiko take her place as the lawyer with a relative at the Commonwealth (as per the comics). The group would eventually have rounded out the cast under Maggie and Negan, if the flagship show hadn't been canceled. At that point, there would've been screentime to flesh out all of them as main characters rather than supporting cast and they didn't have history with Negan, which would've serviced him as the lead of the show.

I don’t know whether the majority of audience is international or American, and I only really know the response of a handful of people from countries outside the US.

I’m from one of the countries Daryl and Carol went to in Europe, and I found all of it very offensive to be honest. It got worse every season, but even, for example, Daryl’s (and Antonio’s) suspenders outfit felt offensive. That’s what Americans think Europeans wear? What century do they think we’re in? To wear that for the whole run of the all three to four seasons. And dressing other characters in similar historical looking clothes.

We have plenty of apocalypse and zombie tv shows and movies made in our own countries, and none of them are anything like that. Did nobody on that show watch any? I’m getting distracted, but really I wanted to ask you about the American response. To me, the spinoff represented the worst of how we feel Americans see us. And so I’m wondering whether the American audience or other people in the business see the issue with the cultural representation too?

I think Norman and/or the other stooges claimed that ‘Europeans would fall back on what they know in the event of a zombie apocalypse,’ as if all Europeans are experts in medieval warfare and virgin sacrifice. It’s obviously wildly offensive to other peoples that these four white men think that rest of the world is somehow backwards for not being American. A lot of the time, travel to Europe is marketed with this idea of “old world charm,” which is very far from how the vast majority of Europeans live, but the creative team behind DD seems to have bought into that concept wholesale.

Zabel didn’t even watch the flagship show, so we can’t expect him to have watched anything that would require subtitles for him to understand and I’d be surprised if the EPs realize that, with global streaming platforms, non-US programming is something Americans watch too. Ben Davis, the guy in charge of programming at the studio, should definitely be looking at international comps, but I doubt that he is, considering the slate at AMC. The international market is important to any show, even at the big traditional networks, because that’s how you keep earning, through licensing.

I can’t speak for what a whole country thinks about a whole continent, obviously. The US is physically large, much bigger than Europe[*] and not everyone here has the same exposure to foreign cultures, but there’s a difference in thinking cobble stoned streets are quaint (audience) and exoticizing a setting (DD’s EPs). It’s something that’s unfortunately usually done to other places, like Asia and South/Central American countries in action adventures, but we do see the occasional spy/cop show have car chases down narrow one-way streets in the historical center of European cities.

So, there's a tendency to transfer culturally American narratives to locations where they don’t fit in order to give the domestic audience a ‘fresh’ setting. For the most part, it doesn't work. Americans see that for the cheap gimmick it is: to disguise your old tired plot that's been done to death.

It’s far more likely for showrunners, directors and studio execs to notice the troubling cultural representation in DD because it’s more common to have visited France and Spain (or the UK) than Morocco or India. (Both require very long flights from the US.) It’s painfully obvious from how Ash (in TBOC) was written as a generic white guy that Zabel has no understanding of Indian cultures either. That said, I don’t know anyone else who produces TV who's watched DD. It's not a show on anyone’s radar.

If a showrunner says, in an interview or at a convention, that they discuss plot lines with the actors, it makes them and (more importantly) the show look good in front of the fans. It doesn't make that statement true. The brand promotion for TWDU is "found family," which is a marketing illusion. Everybody isn't involved in every decision—TV production is hierarchical, not anarchy. People who make a beloved TV show fudge facts for the same reasons everyone else does: to make a good impression and to sell their product.

(If anyone has stumbled across my tumblr by accident: I work in scripted television, so I'm familiar with how a show is produced. I'm not fansplaining.)

Gimple went from supervising producer in S3 to showrunner in S4. That promotion is the equivalent of going from being a first year resident at a hospital to department head. It doesn't happen because the studio 'likes your ideas'—you don't have the necessary skill set or experience to make that large a career jump. It's a major sign that something was afoot BTS during S3. Gimple took advantage of a terrible situation for personal gain; that’s how he’s failed upwards and is still there despite running the show into the ground in S7-8.

There's also a reason why people who've worked on TWD will still talk about Darabont but they don't mention Mazzara. Just like how the agreed upon explanation for Melissa's absence in DD S1 was that it was "logistically untenable" for her to relocate, the same is true for Mazzara and his "failure to produce." Saying that he didn't complete scripts on time is less of a problem for either party than the actual reason he was fired.

I've danced around this topic before because every time I see a fan of the female characters/actors praise this showrunner, I feel nauseous. But in plain English: he's a sexual predator, not a champion for the downtrodden. There are more than a couple of stories about him circulating among female creatives, but here's a screenshot that's directly relevant to TWD:

And why did Andrew Lincoln tell Melissa that Sarah Wayne Callies fought for her if that wasn’t true?

I do think I once heard that they changed it T-Dog because IronE Singleton kept showing up late to set, but I don’t know if that’s true.

Could it not be true both that SWC spoke up on Melissa’s behalf and that she didn’t actually have any power? Melissa said she was asked what she thought of the decision to kill Carol, and that all the writers were on the phone at the time. That seems unusual to me. It seems possible that when SWC was told about Lori’s death, she might have said something similar to what Melissa said, like expressing that she thought it was a shame or a “mistake” as AL put it. She might not have literally lobbied for it, but she might have expressed an opinion here or there, which is still something.

For the record, I like Sarah. I wasn’t saying she’s anything like Gimple. As a woman in the industry, it’s just fraught with danger to voice your opinion on anything outside your own job description. (Telling insecure white men that they’re making “mistakes” is how you get labeled as difficult to work with and potentially fired yourself if they’re petty enough.) Obviously, I wasn’t part of whatever conversations Sarah had with the EPs, so I can’t say for certain what she did or didn’t say, but I am dead sure she wasn’t the first person they told about writing Carol off the show.

Melissa knew before any of her castmates did and would have made her plea first. She saved Carol with how she had created a fleshed out person from the stereotype she was given.

The normal procedure for an actor to be told their option isn’t picked up is for the showrunner or another senior EP to call them. If the actor is a lead, the call is made by the showrunner. For supporting cast, the showrunner’s #2 could place the call because showrunners are very busy during pre-production. If there’s an expectation of trouble, there could be one other person on the call too, like a senior EP or someone from legal, depending on the circumstances surrounding the release. Otherwise, it’s a private conversation.

When you say a TWDU break would be good, how long are you thinking? I thought the problem was that AMC is struggling financially and needs something successful from TWDU fast in order to keep in business.

Thank you for taking a look at the article and giving your take. Really appreciate hearing your insights. And yes, you’re right about the Gimple reunion show quote. I don’t really think it deserves repeating, but he essentially said fans would be shocked to know how much is going on behind the scenes to make it happen and that it’s not guaranteed but he believes it will happen. So, same old.

“...fans would be shocked to know how much is going on behind the scenes to make it happen...”

Well, he would need to pitch a story (which involves a whole lot more than saying “wouldn’t it be cool if...”) to the head of development (aka Bad Ben) and McDermott. There’s detailed paperwork involved in making a pitch and literally everyone at AMC hated Gimple’s efforts at writing a feature; TOWL wouldn’t have happened without Danai’s involvement. Usually, you pitch to a bunch of studio execs and then approach the actors once you have the studio’s interest in the project, but Gimple probably needs Andy to reach out to AMC, saying he’s interested, because Gimple has no credibility as a writer.

TWDU shows aren’t cheap to make because they require a lot of stunts, VFX and building of sets. Anything that involves a lot of work on visuals in post always costs a ton to produce. Add six actor salaries to that, all of whom have expectations on how much they should be featured and it turns into contract negotiation hell. Properly servicing six characters’ arcs in a 6-8 episode limited-run show is a tall order—fans shouldn’t expect something emotionally satisfying with those constraints, even if a good writer was attached.

Because TWDU is also an aged franchise that's been in continuous production for 15 years, it has numerous challenges. One being audience acquisition. AMC would be lucky to recoup production costs of a reunion show because the audience is only people who are already/still invested in TWDU. Rick die-hards, Richonners, Negan apologists fans... A reunion means nothing to people who haven’t watched the other shows and AMC can’t make a profit without attracting new viewers.

So yes, I do believe that Gimple is running around like a muppet behind the scenes, but no mainstream media is picking up the buzz he’s trying to create. If the twitter source for the new quotes on the reunion show is an Arabic language one, then it’s probably the same account Gimple usually uses to try to spread his gospel.

“When you say a TWDU break would be good, how long are you thinking? I thought the problem was that AMC is struggling financially and needs something successful from TWDU fast in order to keep in business.”

It’s a catch-22 for AMC.

They only have two IPs to keep them in the black, so they have to milk TWDU, but when AMC canceled the flagship show to make three concurrent spinoffs, they oversaturated the market. Particularly as some of the shows devalued the IP by damaging the characters in ways that can’t be repaired. The other thing Gimple is interested in making is a next gen show, which is a risky move even if the cast would be cheaper, because none of those characters have enough authority to draw an audience. That’s why AMC cut the coda with young adult Coco, Gracie, Hershel and the Grimes siblings which Gimple wanted in the TWD finale. There is no demand for a show centered on RJ Grimes.

TWDU needs a break long enough to recover from DC and DD. The former poses a problem for the franchise because it’s set further into the future than the other two post-finale spinoffs, and the latter butchered the characterization of both Daryl and Carol, as well as contradicted narrative choices established in the original show. Both shows have painted the franchise into a corner because you can’t pick up the story at the end of either show.

When Angela Kang took over TWD she turned the show into a western because after a decade plus into a zombie apocalypse, the stakes and dramatic tension of survival horror are just gone. You have to find a new angle and shade an aging show and/or franchise differently to make it feel fresh and interesting to the audience. In order to make a successful TWDU show with preexisting characters, there has to be some sort of a reset and that can’t happen while DD hasn’t aired its final season and DC is still in production. I say “some sort” because there’s a variety of ways you could approach a reset that doesn’t involve blatantly rejecting canon the way DD does.

Well, here's the TVLine thing, for reference, with my response to your ask behind the cut:

Oh Gimple. "Sheer thespian power." 🙄

Where is this interview, exactly? (He usually uses DR at EW, TVLine and Collider for his messaging.) Gimple has to be pretty desperate by now: no other studio will hire him and AMC doesn't greenlight his pitches.

Is he running his ideas by the public again? He has a tendency to share his failed pitches with the rest of us, thinking he's a misunderstood genius. But, if the other development execs don't want it, no one will. (AMC has all of one good guy in development. The rest of them are all clowns.)

I have so much to say 🙈 but I’ll confine this post to the three verbal references to Carol’s family in the flagship show. They’re all from Angela Kang’s run and will give us a idea of the discussion inside her writers’ room and the direction they were taking Carol in.

Everything has to serve a purpose:

There’s a need for word economy in screenwriting because a lot of different elements have to fit into a one-hour episode, especially so on an action heavy show. All dialogue has to service the story/character arcs. Cutting for time messes with continuity, pacing and the build of narrative tension, so the writers choose the characters’ words with purpose.

Because the camera is an observer—the audience isn’t inside the protagonist’s head, like in a novel—word choice and phrasing become very important. How a character says something matters. The director and actors will base their interpretation on it, so there’s no such thing as a throwaway line in a script.

Let’s look at the dialogue which introduces Carol’s parents and her grandmother to the viewers:

CAROL’S GRANDMA “Find Me” (1018)

What’s significant in this beat?

Carol’s grandmother had a sewing machine that she put to good use, which tells us that she was practical, handy and self-sufficient. Like Carol.

She made Carol’s clothes, so the family didn’t have much money. The line also implies that she was heavily involved in Carol’s upbringing. It could’ve been a multi-generational household, but she could equally well have been her granddaughter’s primary caregiver.

Having Carol help her and the way in which she did so tells the audience that the two had a good relationship. She enjoyed Carol’s company, she was teaching her things in a playful way and she focused on positive reinforcement in order to get her grandchild to follow directions.

Key takeaway: she might very well be the reason for Carol’s resilience and capacity to love.

CAROL’S MOTHER “New Haunts” (1110)

This line is really interesting. Why does she say “always”? If her mother actively raised her to pay attention to details, Carol would’ve just said, “my mother taught me...” The line implies that it was her mother’s behavior in general that showed Carol the value of being alert. There are two primary ways in which that could be viewed: either Carol’s mother had bad things happen to her because she wasn’t ‘observant,’ or she was unkind to Carol when she wasn’t perceptive enough for her mother’s liking.

It's quite possible that Carol’s dad used to beat her mom. The context of the scene with this line is about making a man’s life easier, but the phrasing does suggest that Carol herself might’ve been verbally or physically abused by her mother. They’re not mutually exclusive possibilities, but they both raise an interesting similarity between Carol and Daryl. Did she see him so clearly, right from the start, because she too had been an unwanted, inconvenient child? We don’t know what Carol's relationship to domestic violence was prior to Ed or how dysfunctional her home environment was.

CAROL’S FATHER “Trust” (1115)

Generally, a woman who enjoys a close relationship with her father, will not refer to him as her “old man.” Especially not if she’s from the Deep South. He’ll be ‘dad’ or ‘daddy’ to her if they had a loving relationship (like Maggie and Beth with Hershel) or more neutrally, when mentioned to a third party, ‘my father.’ “My old man” implies emotional distance, especially with how it’s paired here with a negative assessment. In what context would he have said this? It’s habitual (used to) and Carol’s delivery suggests she’s been the one on the receiving end of that piece of parental ‘wisdom.’ (Compare it to how her grandmother managed her when she was a child.)

It's likely that her father’s life experiences had made him pessimistic. Carol’s parents were young during an era of enormous social change and uncertainty. Depending on his age and exact circumstances, he could even have been subjected to the draft and have served in Vietnam.

In my opinion, it’s relatively safe to say that her parents didn’t have a positive influence on Carol. If a child is constantly told that she shouldn’t have any expectations for a happy outcome and if she has to remain hyper vigilant to protect herself, emotionally or physically, it teaches her that she’s unworthy of consideration or emotional support. Carol’s low self-esteem had its origin long before Ed showed up to make her life worse.

This is very true and very evident, in my experience. Lately, there’s been stronger engagement with fan made Carol and Daryl content than there is with the official account’s attempts at engagement. Even beyond active fans, it feels like there’s a general audience ready and willing to reignite their enjoyment of the show that they remember enjoying way back when, but its fan made content that’s reaching them, not AMC.

Casual viewers have always responded favorably to Carol. That’s actually where you see the biggest dissonance between the creative decisions and audience expectations. It would be expected for a character that’s had a major arc like Carol’s—banishment through assault on Terminus—to emerge as one of the central characters of the narrative. Caryl’s joint emotional arc at the beginning of S5 leads to an expectation that there will be a payoff to that buildup by the end of the season. Instead, everything fizzles and we get increasingly erratic plotting with dropped storylines and story beats which don’t serve the characters. Shock value doesn’t build a lasting audience and there’s the decline in viewership in S6-8 because of the breach in trust between the writer and his audience.

A long running TV show needs to sort of ‘reinvent’ itself around season 5. It’s natural to see a fall in viewer numbers if there’s nothing new added, things mixed up to add excitement for what will happen next. In the case of TWD, Carol’s character development served that purpose, but then everything became muddled in an emotional arc that lacked any kind of emotional realism. You had to really reach to make any kind of sense out of “I can’t kill to protect those I love, so I will leave and pretend that they’re all alive.” It doesn’t fit with the character’s emotional takeaway from the Sophia arc or the grove arc.

The only reason Carol leaves Alexandria is because her inclusion would force the scene where the audience first meets Negan to play out entirely differently from what we got in the show. Even the reveal to Alexandria (in the Wolves arc) that Carol’s a formidable fighter feels hollow/shallow because there’s no one there to absorb the realization. Morgan already knew she was more than she pretended to be and the remaining Alexandrians never acknowledge it.

The general audience identifies with Carol because she rises to the occasion in the way viewers hope they themselves would, if they ended up living through a zombie apocalypse. She grapples with her morally gray decisions, with the demons from her past, with self-worth, with her bereavement in a very human way. It resonates to circumstances beyond her specific ones. The love she has for her extended found family and the sacrifices she makes to take care of them are qualities that are valued in our real life communities.

So, I’m always baffled by AMC’s poor decisions because this is the most basic concept of making a successful TV show. (That is, one that gets sustainable ratings across multiple seasons.) Josh Sapan, the then CEO of AMC, pitched the Caryl spinoff because he knew it would serve as the financial backbone to the franchise and the network. Its emotional core would draw a loyal fanbase and the premise of a road show would satisfy casual viewers with adventure, as well as the parts of the fandom that want an immersive world to be explored. The ‘lure of the West’ has always been an audience draw, from Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows in the 1880’s right through the mid-century Westerns of Henry Ford, to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and onward to HBO’s West World and the shows of Taylor Sheridan.

All a TWDU show really needs is a writer who’s faithful to the characters and can create an intriguing setting for them to explore. Someone who’ll breathe some life back into the tired lore and make that expansive enough to support the creation of more shows within the franchise. It’s really not difficult if you understand narrative structure and have halfway decent imagination. Carol and Daryl are both so rich to write for and Melissa and Norman’s otherworldly chemistry is a dream scenario for any production to have.

I think there’s still a want for caryl things. The fandom has gone very quiet, but it’s not through lack of want or love for the characters as far as I can tell. Absolutely everyone I know is disappointed with DD and nobody I know has any plans to watch season 4, and that has definitely cast a huge shadow over the fandom. But lots of people still love going back to earlier main show seasons as well as AU fan fiction.

I think it helps that AMC haven’t been promoting DD. It’s been allowing fans who previously retreated away to restore our memories of who the characters really are. It’s true that practically nobody wants to think about the spinoff, but honestly, parts of the fandom are waking back up because we finally have the space to enjoy what we actually love about them, rather than what DD has been trying to throw at us. I don’t know how long it will last, given that promotion for s4 is presumably around the corner. But there is still so much love for these characters - the real versions of them.

Sounds like there needs to be more fan made content, so people have something to engage with and to drown out the inevitable noise from the four horsemen trying to promote S4. Fandom should be fun and the DD EPs shouldn’t get to hijack the agenda.

I know I’ve said this before, but the moment your show is released, the characters cease to be ‘yours.’ You may have written for them, but they exist in an in-between space, belonging to the audience’s imagination just as much as the showrunner’s.