The Walking Dead on AMC has been wildly successful through its first five episodes, and it looks like its popularity is only growing as the sixth episode and season finale draw closer. Obviously people have enjoyed the episodes which have been written so far, as The Walking Dead was approved for a second season around the same time the second episode came out. That fact makes the announcement that Executive Producer Frank Darabont has released the entire writing staff for season 2 quite interesting. The obvious question here is why Darabont feels he needs to make such a drastic change on a show that has been so well received? On the surface it seems like a drastic and unnecessary move, but I have a feeling that Darabont knows exactly what he is doing.
The first thing to realize here is how involved Frank Darabont is in the creation of the scripts. Darabont has either written or rewritten almost all of the scripts for season 1, with the exception of an episode written by the creator of The Walking Dead comic book, Robert Kirkman. This lets us know that Darabont knows his way around a zombie script, but he won’t be the only writing even with the entire writing crew gone. Darabont’s plan is to have freelancers write the scripts that he doesn’t, so we could see some more Robert Kirkman episodes. It doesn’t seem like the loss of the writing staff will have too much of an impact on future episodes of The Walking Dead, and as of right now Frank Darabont can do no wrong with this series.
