The Walking Dead is a live action Zombie Apocalypse television series based on the comic of the same name by Robert Kirkman. It is the first installment in The Walking Dead Television Universe. Like the comic, its story focuses on a group of survivors struggling to stay alive in a world overrun by the undead.
Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), the leader of the group, awakens in the hospital from a coma to find everything has gone downhill. He sets out to find his family, and the rest of the show focuses on him and the rest of the characters as they adapt and relate to each other in a grim new world. Though the survivors face great hardship — not just from the undead (referred to as "walkers"), but also from people who are far worse — they find that their most vital resources are each other, and the will to survive day by day. The group takes casualties, finds new members, and suffers brutal defeats, but they push on, with the hope that things get better, no matter how briefly, beyond the horizon.
The series premiered on October 31, 2010 on AMC as a Sunday Evening Drama Series, and was produced by Frank Darabont and Gale Anne Hurd. Darabont served as showrunner for the first season, and Glen Mazzara took over for seasons 2 and 3, followed by Scott M. Gimple, who oversaw seasons 4-8, with Angela Kang taking the reins starting with season 9. Comic creator Robert Kirkman was also heavily involved with the production, including being the writer for several episodes. The Walking Dead concluded with its eleventh and final season, nearly twice the length of a usual season; the Grand Finale aired on November 20, 2022.
The series has its own homepage
. It includes three series of webisodes, the six-part Torn Apart, the four-part Cold Storage, and the three-part The Oath along with other extra content, including online content for the Talking Dead talk show accompanying the series. A fourth series of webisodes titled Red Machete ran alongside Season 8 from fall 2017 to spring 2018. A flash-based adventure game entitled Dead Reckoning is also available on the website, and shows the initial walker encounters of the character Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal) when the outbreak began.
The show's writers knowingly took (creator-approved) liberties with its source material, so comic readers, don't expect to come into this knowing everything beforehand. Word of God says that the intention from the start has been to approach the series as an Alternate Continuity of its own, in which certain events play out differently — sometimes radically so — due to the Butterfly Effect ripples of the additions and subtractions of various characters and events major and minor.
Several spin-offs taking place in the same canon as this series have been produced, with several more slated for future production; see here for more information about these projects.
A Robot Chicken special titled Look Who's Walking, based off the series, aired in late 2017, with many of the show's actors reprising their roles.
See also The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, a first person shooter video game set in the TV series continuity. And The Walking Dead (Arcade), a rail shooter arcade based off the TV show.
