Frank Darabont leaves THE WALKING DEAD

Writer-director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) has stepped down as showrunner of AMC's The Walking Dead, halfway through production on the new 13-episode second season. His replacement is expected to be Glen Mazzara (showrunner of Starz's Crash), who's been working as Darabont's second-in-command after joining the show with a group of new writers—after Darabont disbanded the first season's team. (Update: this has now been confirmed as happening.)

It's not been revealed why Darabont has felt the need to quit, but he's been unhappy with AMC's plans to trim the show's budget, and there were rumours he found it hard to adjust to the demanding pace of TV production (as he comes from a movie background), but this is all just speculation. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some truth in all that, however. The show clearly struggled to produce six episodes last year, so doubling the order to a standard thirteen may have felt particularly gruelling for Darabont.

I have a feeling Darabont would have been happier making The Walking Dead as a series of movies, doesn't like the time/money constraints of television, and perhaps is too authorial to enjoy working in a writers' room. But who knows. Hopefully Darabont will release a statement soon—but those things are usually misleading and don't get at the truth behind these matters. We probably won't know what happened for a few years or more.

It's speculated that Darabont could retain some kind of credit on the show, but without him to steer the ship it'll be interesting to see how The Walking Dead changes halfway through season 2. Hey, it may even improve...

THE WALKING DEAD returns to AMC on 16 October.

Comic-Con 2011 panels: DEXTER, FRINGE, SPARTACUS, TORCHWOOD, TRUE BLOOD & THE WALKING DEAD

San Diego Comic-Con is winding down for another year. I'm sure most of you have been watching and reading the coverage online in some capacity, but I thought I'd embed a few videos of various panels that are relevant to DMD's own coverage. Below are the panels for Dexter, Fringe, Spartacus, True Blood, Torchwood and The Walking Dead. Most were filmed using the "wobbly-cam" that's all the rage, so the quality's not great, but I commend Starz for ensuring their Spartacus panel was professionally recorded in its entirety. (You can click through the subsequent "parts" of each video via YouTube.)

A few more panels may be added soon, when they become available. But in the meantime: enjoy!

Trailers: SPARTACUS: VENGEANCE & THE WALKING DEAD, season 2 (Comic-Con)

Starz apparently showed a fantastic trailer for Spartacus: Vengeance at Comic-Con yesterday, but that hasn't hit the internet yet. But we do have the briefer tease (above), which gives you an idea of the increased scale of production in season 2 (horse-riding sequences set against greenscreen will be achieved), plus our first look at Liam McIntyre (replacing Andy Whitfield as the eponymous Thracian warrior).

McIntyre, speaking at Comic-Con:

"It's a great privilege, a great honor, it's a great responsibility. I was a fan. I would have been sitting down there [in the audience]. All of a sudden, I find myself sitting up here. Everyone can agree Andy [Whitfield] was amazing. The best thing I can do is bust my ass and honor that legacy trying to make season 2 as amazingly as exciting as season 1. And that's all I can do."

The Comic-Con panel, which included showrunner Steven S. DeKnight, also confirmed the return of Ashur and that the story will cleave close to how Stanley Kubrick's movie version ended.

SPARTACUS: VENGEANCE returns to Starz in January 2012.

Comic-Con also gave us a four-minute trailer for The Walking Dead's second season, which certainly looks promising. I didn't really like the first season, which fell flat for me after an entertaining feature-length pilot. Showrunner Frank Darabont has apparently recruited a team of writers who are actually fans of the comic-book now, so I hope that means there'll be more passion on display. Last year's was almost excruciatingly earnest and lacked a sense of pace, rhythm, and... well, enough zombies biting people.

I still have my doubts about The Walking Dead, though. I think there's an audience who will watch anything with zombies in it, those people number greatly, and there's no alternative for them on TV. This will be a hit whatever it does. But for me, I didn't really like any of the characters, and because I can't see a plausible solution for a zombie apocalypse, a TV series of this nature has a constant feeling of futility and depression. A zombie movie can be brilliant if depressing, but you're done with it in two-hours. The Walking Dead could be on-air for another five years or more. By the time Andrew Lincoln's blasting a corpse in the head for the sixtieth time, I'm just not sure I'll care, but we'll see if season 2 manages to change my mind. At least from the trailer it looks like the characters are on the move, instead of hanging around that tedious mountain camp.

THE WALKING DEAD returns to AMC on 16 October.

Video: 'The Walking Dead' VFX Showreel

"The Walking Dead" Demo Reel 2010 from Stargate Studios on Vimeo.

Awhile back I showcased a brilliant greenscreen-themed video by the special-effects company Stargate Studios. Well, here comes another one, but this time focusing exclusively on their work for AMC's zombie drama The Walking Dead. It's incredible that so much of what you see (the landscapes, the weather, the quantity of zombies) is created entirely in a computer. You assume certain things are done digitally (like the limbless zombie girl crawling on the lawn), but it never occurred to me that so many backgrounds were faked using greenscreens. Incredible work.

Includes spoilers for the entirety of season 1, for those who have yet to see it.

[via io9.]