'Fear the Walking Dead' set for 'slow-burn'

The Walking Dead's new companion series will back up from post-apocalyptic to the earth-shattering apocalypse itself.

The original AMC series picked up when Georgia lawman Rick Grimes wakes from a shooting-induced coma, a month or so after zombies have begun stalking the living. Fear the Walking Dead, which premieres on AMC in late summer, will open just as the world is about to change, with people going about their daily business and then having to deal with the growing scourge of the undead.

"We have a window into the fall of society and the rise of the apocalypse. We get to see what Rick missed, but we're doing so through the lens of a highly dysfunctional, fractured family," executive producer Dave Erickson (Sons of Anarchy) says of the six-episode first season.

Fear, located in a different place but the same zombie-ridden world as Dead, focuses on a blended family in on the east side of Los Angeles. Travis (Cliff Curtis), a teacher, is a divorced father who starts a new family with guidance counselor Madison (Kim Dickens), the mother of Nick (Frank Dillane) and Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey). Travis wants his ex-wife, Liza (Elizabeth Rodriguez), and his son, Chris, to accept that he's living with Madison.

"Travis wants to make things right and fix things, even when that seems impossible. Madison is somewhat more pragmatic and has a deeper understanding of things as they unravel. That creates some interesting tension and conflict in what is a very strong relationship," Erickson says.

Fear will ease into the cataclysm. "We don't open the show where it's suddenly chaos, panic and rioting. We wanted to slow-burn the apocalypse and let our characters have some breathing room to establish them in their day-to-day lives," says Erickson, who created the series with Dead creator Robert Kirkman. "Getting to know people through their work and family drama at home sets up all the problems in themselves and their family. It allows us to watch how the rise of the dead fractures things further and how it potentially brings characters together," including those outside the new family.

The characters eventually have to confront the fallout of what a news announcer describes as "a strange virus" (There are no plans to reveal the actual cause, Erickson says.).

Whereas the catastrophe is explained to Rick in Dead, "we get to see our characters stumble through (understanding) that process as walkers begin to emerge. When our characters are confronted by a friend or colleague whom they had coffee with the day before — and they've turned — it becomes the challenge of processing: Why are they behaving this way? Why do they look the way they do?" says Erickson, who says the characters will come up with their own language for what Dead calls walkers. "Our infected look more human. They haven't decayed for over a month."

Unlike police officers Rick and Shane in Dead, Fear characters are "totally ill-prepared. If and when they deal with guns, they're true novices," says Erickson, who says the title conveys the connection to the original but expects fans will eventually simply call it Fear.

Dead and Fear, which has been picked up for two seasons, deal with the same apocalypse, but there is no plan for stories to cross over and viewers can come to the new series without having watched the original, Erickson says.

"The stories have similar rules when it comes to walkers," he says. "There's something lovely when you have two elements in a larger mythology and they collide at some point, but there's no plan to do that right now."