Scott Gimple

More than 18 million people in the U.S. tuned in to The Walking Dead’s jaw-dropping season six finale this past spring. The episode—which ended with new villain-in-chief, Negan, brutally killing an as-yet-undisclosed core character—marked The Walking Dead’s fourth consecutive year as the number one show among adults 18 to 49. Since 2013, Scott M. Gimple has been the showrunner of the AMC original, which airs on FOX feeds across the globe. An ardent fan of the graphic novel on which The Walking Dead is based and a writer on the show since season two, Gimple discusses season six’s shocking cliff-hanger, opinionated fans and managing basic-cable’s biggest hit.

WS: What can you reveal about what’s in store for season seven?
GIMPLE: I can tell you very little about the beginning of the season. I can say that however brutal and painful the start of the story is, that is just the start. It is Krypton exploding [for Superman], it is Thomas and Martha Wayne being shot [for Batman], it is Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru dying [for Luke Skywalker]—it is the trauma that sets our characters into motion.

WS: The trailer released this summer indicated that there would still be some comedic moments, as there have always been in the show, despite the brutal beginning.
GIMPLE: There’s a lot of variety to the stories we are telling. Some of it is very hard, but it isn’t all very hard, and I think that makes the weird or the funny or the strange stuff that much stranger and funnier and weirder. But it also makes the hard stuff that much harder. There is absolutely hope in this world. But it does not seem like it all the time. The characters have to find it.

WS: Coming back after that gut-wrenching cliff-hanger, how was the first table read?
GIMPLE: We don’t do table reads that often. [Our production schedule] makes it difficult to do them. For the first episode, we always do one because we haven’t started production yet, so we have an opportunity to. All the actors are there and there are executives from AMC and a lot of production staff. For me, it is a very heavy thing. These are very visual stories, so it feels a little funny to do a table read—I am not sure how everything is going to fly.

This table read was very intense because everyone knew what was coming—everyone had read the script. At the end of the table read, there was dead silence, punctuated by people crying. Everyone sitting there was just destroyed. There’s a sense that the story was successful in that it was powerful, or hopefully it was, but it is a strange thing because you have a lot of very sad people all around you. It is the starting point for the characters. It is the starting point for the audience. How do you go on from this?

This is a TV show that is part horror, part survival. In a horror movie, the movie ends and you don’t need to know how the characters go on, that isn’t the story. But in [The Walking Dead], the stories that we tell are about how we reach the apex of trauma, of horror, of things that are very, very difficult, and how these characters continue. How they can continue with a life that is real, that has friendship, that has love, that has the possibilities of smiles, after they go through something so terrible.

WS: Online, many fans were unhappy with the cliff-hanger, upset that they would have to wait six months before finding out who had been killed by Negan. Have viewers become impatient in this era of binge-watching?
GIMPLE: The only reaction you get to mea­sure is the online reaction—it takes too long to walk down the street and ask people! It is a pretty techno-savvy group [of fans], so there might be some [impatience]. The audience is the supreme court. How they feel is how they feel, and their feelings are valid. I guess in my mind, if anybody felt that intense about it and that intense about the show, hopefully that is a product of them liking the show a lot.

WS: How do you run your writers’ room and develop story arcs?
GIMPLE: It has been evolving. I’m not a gigantic fan of the room, and I’m not a big fan of walking into the room and going, “What we are doing?” Especially with a show that is based on something that a) I started reading before the TV show existed, and b) there are 157 issues [of the comic, and counting] to draw off of. In general, I have had a plan and trajectories for the characters for a very long time.

Year to year I present to the writers what I hope to do, the general story. Then it is really about them kicking the tires and helping me finesse the whole thing. It is only the first few weeks, when the writers start, that we are intensely together. So many great ideas to heighten what I’m hoping to see come out of that. The [writers are] making connections, playing with the timing of things and some of the characters involved. Then it becomes a very individual [collaboration] between me and the writer or me and Angela Kang, my number two, and the writer. There is a lot of jumping back and forth. I drive the breaking and turn it over to the writer. The writer tweaks it, and Angela tweaks it, and we go back and forth, and other writers might chime in because of other episodes they are working on. I will say that I still do not feel that I have at all come close to cracking the code on how to do it! [Laughs] But the writers are enormously talented and enormously patient with me.

It is a small group, and we have all known each other a while now, and they are very cool to deal with my insanity. It is a bit of a crazy way to do it. We jump back and forth [between Los Angeles and the set in] Georgia. Sometimes we are sitting in a room in Georgia and sometimes we are here [in L.A.]. Sometimes we are on the phone. Sometimes I have been communicating with a writer every other day, but I have not seen him for weeks and weeks. Luckily we have worked with each other a while, so there’s a comfort with each other. Also, there’s Robert [Kirkman, creator of the Walking Dead graphic novel] on top of all that. Robert is not just a writer; he is an executive producer, he is somebody I lean on in very global things. At the beginning of the season, I do this global break on my own, and I usually sit down with Robert at one point and kick things around as to the directions I am going in. So much of it is his work that I am just remixing. I like circling back with him and showing him how I have recut the record, but it is usually his song.

WS: You mentioned having a small group of writers, yet the scope of the series in terms of characters and locations has grown tremendously.
GIMPLE: A lot of [the story lines and characters are] drawn from the comics. There are some things that the comics just mention, and there are so many characters, so we can extrapolate. We take the basis of what’s there, and we don’t completely go off in a new direction unless that new direction somehow serves to circle back to the greater story. We make sure that each of the characters has a voice and a direction to go in, an emotional arc. You work that out before anything else and then you connect it with the other characters and move them towards their arcs. Characters affect each other. It’s all about the relationships.

WS: Visual effects play a significant role in the show. How do you manage that aspect of the production process?
GIMPLE: Visual effects have been such an enormous part of the show since the beginning. When I took this job, I think they became an even bigger part of the show. We have an incredibly talented group of people doing that who do work tirelessly, and it is something that I heavily involve myself with, to everyone’s exhaustion. Whether it’s a blood splatter or an explosion, it has to be as real as possible to keep the audience engaged. The more invisible a visual effect is, the more effective it is. We have some geniuses working on the show. I work them very hard because [if I were not making the show] I would be the viewer on the internet talking about it!

WS: Your fans are very, very vocal, and of course have their favorite characters who, from time to time, are killed off. How do you cope with that experience, of frequently losing core cast members?
GIMPLE: It’s an incredibly wonderful, warm, professional group of people that I am working with that I don’t ever want to part from. The people we have lost are people I enjoyed working with, people I counted as friends. Nobody is [really] dying, but [losing cast members is] enormously difficult. It’s a very emotional thing.

I do look at these people and think that they are going to have so many opportunities. There are so many people that have left the show and gone on to do such great things. But you do want to work with them. You want to have them playing in your band. They are all so talented. This is a show that purposely shoots itself in the foot every few episodes by losing people who are critical, but that is part of the world that Robert created. He has done it himself in the book with such great characters that people have enjoyed that disappear in an instant.

WS: I am both looking forward to and dreading that first episode of season seven!
GIMPLE: And you should! Have loved ones close. Put your affairs in order. Also, know that it isn’t the end; it really is the beginning. It’s a painful beginning, but it’s a beginning.