After Season 3, someone else will have to pick up the baton and carry the show into the future.
Under Erickson's leadership, Fear the Walking Dead survived some awkward growing pains and won over a devoted following despite concerns that the show would never be anything but a pale imitation of The Walking Dead. This is great news for Erickson professionally but may not be great news for the show he's leaving behind. We look forward to many more successful collaborations." We are also incredibly excited that Dave has chosen to stay in the AMC family to pursue his next passion project.
With Dave as showrunner, the series fulfilled its creative promise to expand the Walking Dead universe in a way that was totally unique from the original series, and has gone on to become the number two drama series in ad-supported cable, behind only The Walking Dead.
"We’re beyond grateful for Dave’s amazing work on the first three seasons of Fear the Walking Dead. Network exec Joel Stillerman had this to say about Erickson: Variety reports that Erickson will be leaving after the third season to develop other projects for AMC. What does the future hold for AMC's second-most-popular show? With the third season set to begin this summer, the show's long-term future is a little bit up in the air with news of a shake-up at the top David Erickson by all accounts has done a fine job as showrunner for Fear the Walking Dead, and with success comes other opportunities.
Nick's destruction of the dam, at the risk of his and his family's lives, is a fitting way for Erickson to depart the show, but in addition to giving the incoming showrunners a nearly blank slate to start from, it brings a flood of potential for a series whose promise has mostly gone unrealized.Dismissed initially by some as a mere cynical attempt to cash in on the success of The Walking Dead, AMC's Fear the Walking Dead has survived through two seasons and begun forging its own identity separate from the show that spawned it. Though not as much of a ratings juggernaut as the original, Fear more than held its own in 2016, finishing as the #12 show on TV in the 18-49 demographic according to Nielsen (via Zap2it).
In doing so the show strayed too far from what made it unique in the first place – the disorienting newness of the zombie outbreak, and dystopian appeal of a ruined metropolis serving as the backdrop for an exploration of the lengths to which humans will go to survive. That plan was put on hold as the series squandered the potential of a bold sea-faring narrative, and again as the characters wandered the wildernesses of Mexico and southern Texas for the last season and a half.
Turning the conflict into a family affair would also help bring the series full circle, as the main selling point when the spinoff was first announced was the dynamic of an average, middle-class family facing an end-of-the-world scenario together. That would be in keeping with her recent trajectory, as Madison's confession about killing her father and the ease with which she played both sides of Broke Jaw Ranch against one another suggested a troublingly dark potential for her moving forward, all of which culminated in her swift execution of Troy after deciding he'd become too much of a liability.