Another year of zombie mayhem is upon us! But tonight we’re not talking about The Walking Dead. We’re talking about Fear The Walking Dead.

AMC’s Walking Dead spinoff with a less-than-stellar name makes its series premiere tonight following months of anticipation.

Fear The Walking Dead follows an entirely new set of characters as the zombie apocalypse begins to spread in the Los Angeles area. There are no references to the characters over on The Walking Dead, and the timing of the storyline is slightly different.

“What happened to the population during those couple of weeks while Rick was in his coma?” That’s the question Fear The Walking Dead will answer in season 1 (and hopefully* in the already-announced season 2).

It’s an interesting premise, and it makes for a compelling premiere episode. Hypable had the chance to watch the first two episodes of Fear The Walking Dead, and we liked what we saw. It was fascinating to watch the shock and denial play out amongst the humans as bizarre things start happening around Los Angeles.

In a way, Fear The Walking Dead is more interesting than its predecessor because it feels more grounded in reality. The dramatic scenes that occur in this series could happen tomorrow in the real world — one minute all could be fine, and the next minute cops could be trying to figure out why no number of bullets will kill a person.

Showrunners have emphasized that, like the original zombie series, Fear is about the characters, not zombies. As such, you can expect lots of character development in this series as the city of Los Angeles deals with a societal meltdown of epic proportions.

The relationships we’ve seen between the characters in the first two episodes are interesting because they differ greatly from what we see in The Walking Dead. The chief difference? In Fear, all the characters know one another before the zombie apocalypse. As such, you should expect the inevitable deaths to have more of an impact on the characters.

What’ll also make the show fun to watch is that all viewers will be completely in the dark about where the show might be going. Fear is not based on any of The Walking Dead comics, so all we will have to reference for clues about the future of the series is previous episodes.

Take a look at the making of the show below:

*One thing we’re concerned about is longevity. Yes, the series is about the characters, but will we care about Fear once the early days of the outbreak are over? We hope that the spinoff moves across the calendar as slowly as possible in order to explain the early days as much as possible.

It’ll be interesting to see what the ratings are like for Fear. AMC is banking on the show to be a big hit, and we’re sure their hopes will be very possible to achieve. Part of the success may come from the fact that Walking Dead viewers are aching for more zombies on their screens (it’s been three agonizing months since the season 5 finale!)

Return to Hypable after the series premiere for our recap of everything that went down!