The Walking Dead adding third series, focused on 2 female protagonists

Making good on its plans to grow The Walking Dead into an expanded universe of movies and TV shows, AMC is preparing to launch a completely new Walking Dead scripted series next year.

The new show will focus on a pair of female protagonists, and will be the first to explore the stories of the generation born after the zombie apocalypse. The still-unnamed new series will join Fear the Walking Dead and franchise flagship The Walking Dead, which debuted in 2010, as the third scripted series in AMC’s Robert Kirkman-created Walking Dead universe.

The series will begin filming in Virginia this summer, and will take place in a new part of the zombie-plagued world. According to AMC, the series will "focus on the first generation to come-of-age in the apocalypse as we know it. Some will become heroes. Some will become villains. In the end, all of them will be changed forever. Grown-up and cemented in their identities, both good and bad." The first season will span 10 episodes.

Longtime TWD writer Matt Negrete reportedly co-created the new series in partnership with Scott Gimple, AMC’s Walking Dead lore-verse architect, and also has been set as showrunner.

"Showing audiences an unseen pocket of The Walking Dead Universe steeped in a new mythology is a very cool way to celebrate a ‘Decade of the Dead’ on TV and over fifteen years of Robert Kirkman’s brilliant comic,” Gimple said in AMC's announcement. “Matt Negrete is one of the best writer-producers in TWD’s long history — I'm thrilled to be working beside him to tell stories unlike we’ve seen before, taking our first step into an even larger world.”

The order for a new series comes just as AMC is winding down its least-watched season of The Walking Dead ever, despite the show’s just-completed ninth season getting lots of love from lots of fans and critics.  But for The Walking Dead, even comparatively low recent ratings still mean huge numbers: first-run episodes in the main series are still dominating TV on Sunday nights.

AMC has teased a lot of character crossovers, especially with Kirkman and Gimple’s ongoing excitement over the upcoming Rick Grimes movie trilogy, as well as new possibilities for Maggie Greene to show up somewhere fresh. But the network so far hasn’t hinted whether we can expect to see any familiar faces in the new series.

In the meantime, the next new batch of episodes in the growing TWD universe starts arriving this summer, when Season 5 of Fear the Walking Dead debuts debuts June 2 on AMC.