Hi Herc,

Just to clarify the announcement:

It's not a 6-episode miniseries. It's intended as a regular ongoing series.

AMC is going into it as they did with "Breaking Bad" (which, on a personal note, gets my passionate vote as being the best series on television right now, hands-down): those familiar with "Breaking Bad" may have noticed it was actually a "half season" approach consisting of 7 episodes. When that first season proved successful, AMC then transitioned to the standard 13 episodes per year as of season two.

Same idea here. If WD finds its audience, following seasons will continue with the standard 13 episodes.

It's a very smart approach on AMC's part, in addition to being a tremendous show of their faith: as with "Breaking Bad," instead of giving us just a single pilot episode to prove ourselves, AMC has gone out on a limb and greenlit half a season to kick things off and give our show a chance to bring the audience in. Gale Anne Hurd and I are very grateful to them for that.

Hope that helps dispell any confusion.

Best,
Frank

AMC has added to the cast of Frank Darabont's apocalyptic zombie drama "The Walking Dead."

The production has tapped Laurie Holden for the role of Andrea, a key member of the survivor group who has a proficiency with a sniper rifle and falls for a man twice her age.

Holden was in writer-producer-director Darabont's "The Mist" and had a recurring role in the final season of FX's "The Shield." She is repped by APA and Framework.

Also, Adam Fierro has joined the production as a consulting producer. The ICM-repped Fierro has worked on such serialized dramas as "Dexter," "Shield" and "24."

In addition, newcomer Steven Yeun has been added to the cast as Glenn. He and Holden join Andrew Lincoln, Jeffrey DeMunn and Jon Bernthal on the show.

So right now it’s like full speed ahead and they are moving forward with this pilot. I wrote the first episode and then they are going to be shooting all summer for the first six episodes. Frank is in Atlanta right now doing prep, so he’s kind of hard at it. They start shooting in, I think, a week.

Quint: Is it an hour long show or half hour?
Robert Kirkman: It’s an hour long.

Quint: Here’s a question that I know a lot of fans have asked… I’ve seen this pop up a lot in our talkback. Has there been any talk at all about shooting the show in black and white?
Robert Kirkman: No, no there isn’t. I have a concern that if people were flipping the channels and they saw something that was in black and white, they might think it was an old movie. It’s just something that’s usually not done on television and while I think it’s neat and I know Darabont likes black and white a lot, that’s why there’s a black and white version of THE MIST on the DVD and he wanted to do the movie in black and white originally. I don’t know that there’s going to be a black and white version of the show on the DVD. There might be, but it just doesn’t make sense as a television show for a lot of reasons.

Robert Kirkman: Well, one of the many cool things about the show is that while it is going to follow the comic book to a pretty close degree, there’s going to be things that happen in the show that have happened in the comic and most of the characters are there and if the characters aren’t there initially, there will be more characters from the book added in as we go on, but the show is going to have new characters that aren’t in the comic. It’s going to have differences in the storyline and so there’s going to be things in the comic that it just never touches on and it’s really going to be “There’s the television story and then there’s the comic book story,” so as far as catching up to the comic series, it’s not really going to be possible because as time goes on they are not going to be really following the same story.