Back in September, it was announced that AMC’s hit zombie drama The Walking Dead would conclude in 2022 with an extra-long 11th season. According to Jeffrey Dean Morgan, the actor who portrays the nefarious Negan, this may not have always been the plan.

During an interview with Collider, Morgan said that the news of the series’ conclusion was “a complete surprise, not only to me and the rest of the actors but to everybody involved in the show from production. [Walking Dead franchise boss] Scott Gimple and [showrunner] Angela Kang had no idea, either.” While The Walking Dead might not have been officially canceled, season 11 clearly wasn’t supposed to be the show’s last.

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While he acknowledged that the feeling of finality hasn’t quite set in yet, as they still have a lot of shooting left to go for The Walking Dead's final season, Morgan said that working on season 11 and knowing there won’t be a season 12 is “f*cking surreal as hell.” He said that the new season feels a lot bigger than the others, and that “there’s so much story and it’s very grand in scale,” although he’s only been sent four of the season’s scripts so far. He said that, in this first batch of scripts, the ongoing narrative has “no reference and no feeling... that it’s ending at all. It’s opening up all of these new chapters that are really interesting and cool.”

This season will mark the end of the flagship series, but it won’t mark the end of The Walking Dead franchise altogether. A spin-off revolving around Daryl and Carol will begin airing in 2023, and there are a bunch of other movies and TV series in development. The show’s existing spin-offs, Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead: World Beyond, both have new episodes on the way. Andrew Lincoln is signed on to star in a trilogy of movies chronicling Rick Grimes’ adventures after he was impaled on a steel beam and taken away by a helicopter.

The Walking Dead was once the highest-rated show on TV, but the season 7 premiere “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be” – which marked Morgan’s first full appearance as Negan beyond cameo-level teases – began a steady decline in ratings that may have led to this possible cancelation. While Morgan’s performance has always been praised, that episode took the gore a step too far for many viewers, particularly in Glenn’s gruesome death scene – which was accurate to the comics, but came off as way more disturbing in live-action as opposed to a black-and-white drawing.

Season 11 of The Walking Dead is set to consist of 24 episodes, as opposed to the standard 16, which has been the show’s regular episode count since the third season back in 2012. The final season will begin airing later this year and eventually wrap up its run (and the entire series run) in 2022.

The Walking Dead airs on Sundays as 9/8 on AMC.

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Source: Collider