It's Zombie Christmas as The Walking Dead gets an 11th season and a returning Lauren Cohan
At this point, we’ve been making jokes about the sheer, bloody-minded unkillability of AMC’s The Walking Dead for so long that even those once-fresh quips are now dead and shambling around, spawning little grand-zombies of their own. So it’s not entirely surprising to report today, ahead of the show’s 10th season premiere, that the still-very-successful-despite-a-couple-of-ratings-oopsies series has been revived by its network for an 11th run on the air. That being said, there was at least one spark of something (sort of) new that came out of today’s New York Comic-Con session for the show: Lauren Cohan will be coming back to the series as a regular for its 11th time around the old undead-encrusted block.
Cohan’s presence on the series has been something of a Schrödinger’s Widow over the last year or two, as her commitment to ABC’s (actually pretty fun) spy series Whiskey Cavalier made filming on the AMC show difficult. But since Whiskey Cavalier has now gone to the big “TV shows whose names slip out of your memory like a beautiful summer’s dream” place in the sky, she’s now free to return to the series that helped make her famous, and also, occasionally, extremely covered in zombie gunk. She made the announcement with a surprise appearance at the Con; the assumption is that she’ll be popping up this year on the series, and not just in the just-announced next one.
Staffing changes are nothing new for The Walking Dead, of course, which prides itself on literally chewing its way through vast swathes of its cast every few years. Still, they have had a few more high-profile ones of late; series star Andrew Lincoln left halfway through the show’s ninth season, and Danai Gurira has made it clear she’ll be gone by the end of its 10th, which debuts tomorrow night on AMC. Coming back is slightly rarer, on account of, well, the impermeability of the barrier what separates us from the realm of the dead. Still, hey: Maggie’s back!