‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Season 2: When Will It Air Next Year?

Fear The Walking Dead is the companion series to the hugely successful The Walking Dead. Season 1 of Fear focused on the time during Rick Grimes’ coma in Season 1 of The Walking Dead. Although, Fear is set in L.A. rather than in the south like the flagship program, giving the audience not only the chance to see how the zombie apocalypse unfolded, but introducing new characters and an urban location as well. Fans have found the show a little slow compared to the original show. However, ratings, while dropping week to week, have still managed to pull in a decent amount of viewers. Although, as Carter Matt pointed out, if Season 2 is to succeed, Fear needs to “figure out how to make us care for all of its individual people” as it enters the next season.

Season 1 of Fear The Walking Dead premiered on August 23, 2015 with a short six-episode season. While this is something AMC does, it also means fans are left wondering when the extended Season 2 will premiere rather than being able to make an educated guess based on previous years. After all, once a show is established, the yearly run of programming for a network is fairly predictable.

Considering the Season 1 finale of Fear The Walking Dead leads straight into the Season 6 premiere of the flagship program, The Walking Dead, it seems likely that Season 2 of Fear The Walking Dead will start next year, 15-16 weeks before the premiere of Season 7 of The Walking Dead, since AMC has already announced Fear The Walking Dead will run for 15 episodes for Season 2. You can add in the Labor Day weekend as well and that will account for the extra week due to the fact AMC usually places its big programs on hiatus during that weekend, as it did with Fear this year.

This is a schedule that just might work to not only get people tuning in for Fear The Walking Dead and bolster its ratings for a show that premiered to record numbers but then dropped considerably week to week. It also helps to build anticipation for the original zombie apocalypse series Fear The Walking Dead is based on, The Walking Dead.

According to The Wrap, once Live +7 views are calculated, while Fear’s viewership numbers dropped week by week, they still managed to draw in, on average, 11.4 million total viewers per episode. This makes Season 1 of Fear The Walking Dead more popular than the first season of The Walking Dead. However, The Walking Dead managed to pull in 15.8 million viewers for its Season 5 finale, so Fear has plenty of work still to do to keep viewers tuning in. Although, it is possible some fans are holding out to watch Fear The Walking Dead in one hit during the Walking Dead marathon in order to get a feel for the two series overall rather than tuning in week to week on a show that only ran for six episodes this year.

However, AMC also premiered their new series, Humans, this year. This show has also been renewed for a second season according to Entertainment Weekly, so if they want to keep that programming schedule, there might have to be a bit of a shuffle in 2016 for AMC’s programming. Although, considering Humans only managed to pull around 1.7 million viewers per episode, according to TV Series Finale, it seems the shuffle may be with AMC’s scheduling of Humans rather than Fear The Walking Dead.

What did you think of AMC’s Fear The Walking Dead? Will you be tuning in for Season 2 next year? When do you think AMC will schedule it next year? Let us know by commenting below!

[Image credits: AMC]