The Walking Dead producer updates us on season 11 progress

Greg Nicotero, a producer and special effects makeup supervisor who has worked on The Walking Dead for years, has given fans an update on the progress of season 11. Of course, season 10 isn’t yet complete. The season finale, “A Certain Doom,” was shot, but the coronavirus-mandated shutdown in Hollywood has prevented the crew from putting the finishing touches on it, and it’s been delayed — there’s still no release date. However, development on season 11 still needs to crack on regardless of the delay.

Nicotero is hopeful that the scripts can all be done and dusted by the time production is scheduled to begin. The hope, obviously, is that it’s actually safe enough to actually shoot the show by this time. “The good news is the writers are cranking away,” he told Den of Geek. “So fingers crossed that we’ll have all of our scripts or a lot of the scripts ready to go by the time we start production. Television’s tricky because you got to give the writers’ room time to break the story. Once you get into production and that boat leaves the dock, then you’re sort of holding on for dear life.”

Nicotero’s main hope is for the writing team to make as much progress as possible on the scripts while in lockdown so that go full speed ahead when shooting does finally start. “I think the plan is to try to get as far as we can on the scripts, so once we hit the ground running in production, a lot of the challenges and a lot of the hiccups will have already been refined and ready to go.”

He also gave us a better insight into what exactly is causing the delay on the season 10 finale. He directed “A Certain Doom,” after all, so he would know.

“I mean, the trick with post-production that a lot of people don’t realize is there’s so many little refinements and last-minute embellishment,” he said. “You have to do post-production sound, and you have to do music, and then you have to go in and do color timing to make sure that every shot in a scene is color timed the same way so that they look all look like it’s coming from the same scene.

"There are quality checks that you have to do, to make sure there’s not like a Starbucks cup in the shot, or whatever. There’s a lot of those little fine-tuning elements that all happen within two to three weeks of delivering the episode to the network. So we were right on the cusp of just about finishing the episode when everybody had to stop work."

Game of Thrones is never going to live that coffee cup down, is it?

Nicotero doesn’t know when it will air, but guesstimates that the team will have the episode finished within “a week and a half or two weeks of fine-tuning” by the time the lockdown is over and many of us get to return to work.

It definitely looks like they have their work cut out for them. When you take into account the high standard of this season and the wait we have to endure for the finale, the bar has been set incredibly high. If the teaser is anything to go by, it will be one epic episode!

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