Stay Tuned

The Daily Star, Oneonta, N.Y., Friday, February 26, 2021 4 By Kyla Brewer TV Media G ood things come to those who wait, as the saying goes, but the wait for new episodes can test even the most dedicated of TV fandom. Luckily for zombie fans, one of television's most successful horror series is about to return. Following the end of the Whisperer War, the survivors scatter and struggle to find the strength to go on as they face past traumas and deal with new threats in "The Walking Dead," airing Sunday, Feb. 28, on AMC. The mid-season debut kicks off the final six episodes of Season 10, each of which will focus on small groups of the show's characters in the lead-up to TWD's 11th and fi- nal season. Subscribers to AMC's streaming service AMC+ will get to watch the new episodes even earlier as they premiere on Thursdays, beginning Feb. 25. Based on the comic book se- ries of the same name by Rob- ert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, "The Walking Dead" follows a group of peo- ple trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. Over the course of several seasons, they have banded together to battle all kinds of threats from both the undead and the living. When the most recent epi- sode of "The Walking Dead" aired in October, the characters had finally triumphed over the Whisperers and Daryl (Norman Reedus, "The Boondock Saints," 1999) killed their lead- er, Beta (Ryan Hurst, "Sons of Anarchy"). The episode also featured the return of Maggie (Lauren Cohan, "Whiskey Cav- alier"), who had been gone since Season 9, her where- abouts unknown. Originally scheduled to air on April 12, 2020, the episode was sup- posed to be the Season 10 fi- nale, but it was announced during San Diego Comic Con's Home Stream event that an additional six episodes would air between February and April 2021. In January, Cinema Blend revealed that "The Walking Dead" showrunner Angela Kang had explained that each of the six remaining episodes would focus on what is going on with specific characters, rather than moving the story forward as a whole. "There [are] some other things that we're doing deep dives into, like Daryl and Carol and Negan, Gabriel, and Aaron has some really cool stuff," Kang said. Fans can expect to meet some new characters as Sea- son 10 winds down, too. View- ers who caught the October episode would have gotten a glimpse of Maggie's new masked ally, Elijah, who is played by Okea Eme-Akwari ("Greenland," 2020). Robert Patrick ("Terminator 2: Judg- ment Day," 1991) will also ap- pear in Season 10 as Mays, a "rough-looking survivor" who encounters Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam, "The Wire"). One of the six new episodes will fo- cus completely on Negan (Jef- frey Dean Morgan, "Supernat- ural") and give viewers some insight into his backstory with an appearance by his wife, Lu- cille, namesake of his trade- mark baseball-bat-turned- weapon. Incidentally, Mor- gan's real-life wife, Hilarie Bur- ton Morgan ("One Tree Hill"), will portray Lucille. Other storylines featured in the new bonus episodes in- clude Maggie and Daryl bat- tling an unseen and unknown threat, Negan's safety once again in jeopardy, and Daryl and Carol (Melissa McBride, "Dawson's Creek") coming across an old cabin that makes Daryl think of the time he left the group. Gabriel and Aaron (Ross Marquand, "Avengers: Infinity War," 2018) are put to the test while on a scouting mission, while, elsewhere, Eu- gene (Josh McDermitt, "Last Comic Standing"), Ezekiel (Khary Payton, "Young Jus- tice"), Yumiko (Eleanor Matsu- ura, "Utopia") and Princess (Paola Lázaro, "Lethal Weap- on") are captured. Also, Daryl and Carol appear to go their separate ways. The remaining six episodes of Season 10 will surely be bittersweet for fans of the se- ries who know that the next season will be the show's last. It's been an unlikely hit in the sea of typical comedies and dramas that air on prime time. The show premiered in 2010 to solid ratings, attract- ing an average of between four and six million viewers. The show's popularity grew, and in 2014 "The Walking Dead's" Season 5 premiere attracted more than 17 mil- lion viewers, making it one of the most watched cable se- ries in history. The show's rat- ings have slowly declined since then, but it has earned its share of industry acco- lades, including a Golden Globe nomination for Best Television Series — Drama and a Writers Guild of Ameri- ca Award nomination for Best New Series. "The Walking Dead" won a Primetime Cre- ative Arts Emmy Award for Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup for a Series, Limited Series, Movie or Special in 2011. Even though the beginning of the end may be near for the original "The Walking Dead," its legacy will live on in various spinoffs. "Fear the Walking Dead," which looks at a totally different group of survivors earlier in the apocalypse, has been going strong since 2015. More recently, AMC premiered "The Walking Dead: World Be- yond," which focuses on a group of mostly younger survi- vors. It premiered in October and is slated for two seasons. Much to the delight of fans, fa- vorites from the original show, Daryl and Carol, will get their very own as-yet-unnamed se- ries, tentatively scheduled to premiere in 2023. coverstory Jeffrey Dean Morgan stars in "The Walking Dead" The zombie saga continues: 'The Walking Dead' returns to prime time By Adam Thomlison TV Media Q: Is Tyler Perry's "The Haves and the Have Nots" com- ing back? A: We "have" a few more episodes of the beloved, long- running OWN drama left, after which we all become "have nots." The show is midway through its eighth season, and the news of its cancellation came as it went into mid-season hia- tus. The back half of this now-final season will premiere in May. The series has been a flagship for OWN, helping revive its ratings after a few rough early years, and it seems that no one is sadder to see it go than Oprah Winfrey herself (she's the "O" and "W" in OWN, in case you didn't know). "'The Haves and the Have Nots' was the first scripted drama we aired on OWN, and to say it took off from the first day it hit the air is an understatement," she said in the official an- nouncement of the show's cancellation. "I will be watching alongside you all during this final season." She didn't say why the show is ending, but we can make some guesses. Its ratings have been falling pretty steadily over the past few seasons — the first half of Season 8 drew just over a million sets of eyes on average, whereas last season drew an average of 1.32 million, and early in the show's run, that number was nearly double at close to 3 million. But a bigger factor is likely that Tyler Perry has a new deal with ViacomCBS. "The Haves and the Have Nots" was the last of the many shows Perry produced for OWN before moving over to produce for ViacomCBS's BET. Q: Who sings the theme for "Dawson's Creek"? A: This seemed like it was going to be easy. I was about to go ahead and say that it's Paula Cole, singing "I Don't Want to Wait," one of the great pop-songs-as-theme-songs in TV histo- ry, but that's because I haven't checked in on "Dawson's Creek" in a while. If you're watching it on Netflix these days, or on some DVD releases, you're hearing a different theme: "Run Like Mad" by Canadian pop star Jann Arden. That may be disappointing for original fans, but it was a rather clever selection. Swapping out the theme song of a be- loved show always risks angering the purists in the audience, but picking "Run Like Mad" kind of out-pures the purists be- cause it was the producers' original choice. It was, in fact, writ- ten and recorded specifically for use as the "Dawson's Creek" theme. The story goes that, after commissioning Arden to do the theme, the show's producers put together a series of promo- tional videos for the show with various then-current pop songs in the background. A WB Network exec saw the one with "I Don't Want to Wait" on the soundtrack and asked the produc- ers to use that as the theme instead. They did, but unfortunately they only cleared the song rights for broadcast and the first two seasons of a DVD release. And now the rights holders aren't willing to shell out for more. Despite things coming back full circle to Arden's song, no one's really happy with the arrangement (pun not intended, but gladly left in). Have a question? Email us at questions@tvtabloid.com. Please include your name and town. Personal replies will not be provided. hollywoodQ&A

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