Glen Mazzara Opens Up About Walking Dead Exit

AMC has named Scott Gimple as The Walking Dead’s new showrunner, but many have been left wondering why Glen Mazzara, who has done such a great job with season three, left before the season was completed. Mazzara has now come out to tell his side of the story.

“I was sort of the hired gun coming in to support the creator of the show, and through odd circumstances I ended up becoming showrunner,” Mazzara said at NATPE, via The Hollywood Reporter. “When you’re the creator, you can say, ‘This is what the show is.’ I didn’t create the show. I didn’t create the comic book, so I’m just glad I was able to contribute.”

He added, “On ‘Walking Dead,’ because I was coming into a culture with all the different writers and producers and now I was stepping up, I really wanted to build that team. I wanted everybody invested in what we were doing. I didn’t think it would be right to say, ‘OK, there’s a new sheriff in town.’ That wasn’t my attitude, and I felt like the show would have definitely failed if that was the case.”

The main problem? Everyone wanted to have their say. Mazzara claimed that he would get notes from AMC, 15 producers and even the cast members about their scripts, and then turn those around to try to appease all parties.

“There’s no way you can take every note. There’s no way you can make everybody happy. So I’d just sort of go through and do a rewrite on the entire script trying to include all of those different voices, all of those different perspectives,” he said. “At the end of the day, though, you’re never going to get consensus. So that’s where I have to say, ‘I feel this is the best possible script.’ … At the end of the day, somebody has to make the call. Otherwise, it’s just chaos.”

Comments are closed.