Showing a bit more restraint than it did when it preemptively gave the series a second season, AMC has decided to prolong viewers’ terror and renew Fear The Walking Dead for a third season. The Walking Dead companion series kicked off its 15-episode sophomore season earlier this week in the more luxe, but still perilous, setting of a yacht on open water. The band of survivors, led alternately by Kim Dickens and Cliff Curtis’ characters whenever they’re not in a snit with each other, has already witnessed piracy on the high seas, though that didn’t stop their daughter Alicia from giving away their location because she just needed to talk to someone who’s not on the boat with her.
But we digress: AMC president Charlie Collier applauded the work that showrunners Dave Erickson and Robert Kirkman have done in dramatizing the not-so-precipitous decline of civilization in the wake of a zombie—sorry, walker —outbreak. “Watching Los Angeles crumble through the eyes of our characters and seeing each make decisions and try to figure out the rules of their new world—it’s fresh, eerie and compelling and we’re all in for the ride,” Collier said, presumably while considering that loading up a fancy boat with supplies is one of the better plans that characters have executed in the Walking Dead franchise.
The show has hit some choppy waters, though, as viewership for the season two premiere dropped 37% in the 18-49 demographic from its record-breaking series premiere in August 2015. But this could lead the show to deliver the zombie-shark fight it knows viewers want, in an effort to boost those numbers.