TV Talk: McCandless native takes ‘Walking Dead’ to France; Greensburg murder case on Very Local

No, the zombies in the first European-set spin-off of “The Walking Dead” do not gurgle and moan with a French accent.

But “The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon” (9 p.m. Sunday on AMC, already streaming on AMC+), named after the show’s lead character played again by Norman Reedus, does feature nuns wielding weapons, so count that as something new.

As the series begins, Daryl washes ashore on the French coastline looking not that different from a zombie himself. How did he get there? Why is he now separated by an ocean from the folks in the original series, particularly Carol (Melissa McBride)?

“Daryl Dixon” drops some breadcrumbs as Daryl shares pieces of his story with new characters including a nun (Clemence Poesy) who believes a Timothee Chalamet look-alike (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi) may somehow offer salvation from the zombie apocalypse. Daryl must escort him to safety a la “The Last of Us.”

McCandless native Greg Nicotero has been involved in “Walking Dead” series since the franchise first shuffled onto the AMC lineup in 2010. For “Daryl Dixon,” Nicotero was “boots on the ground” in France where the show’s first and second seasons filmed.

“Norman really, really wanted me to be part of the team for ‘Daryl Dixon’ and I did too,” Nicotero said in late August, a couple of days after he visited Pittsburgh to see the Guns N’ Roses concert at PNC Park. “We have a new showrunner, David Zabel, and my real job was to provide some continuity between the universe but also to educate the new production team [about] how we do the zombie stuff, how quickly we can do it, how ingeniously we can do it and if it had been done before steer away from that and do something new.”

“‘Dead City’ and [2024’s] Rick and Michonne [limited series “The Ones who Live”] both had some folks that had worked on other iterations of the show,” Nicotero continued. “Since we were in France, it was me and Norman and maybe three or four other people that actually worked on the [original] show.”

Nicotero is also showrunner on “Creepshow,” returning to Shudder, AMC+ and linear AMC for its fourth season at 10 p.m. Oct. 13, so he was too busy working on zombie special effects to direct full episodes in the six-episode first season of “Daryl Dixon,” but he estimates he directed 20% of the first two episodes, helming second unit filming of scenes of Daryl crossing France.

“It was really all intended to play into the fish-out-of-water scenario where Daryl doesn’t know where he is, the audience doesn’t know how he got there,” Nicotero said. “Norman had this idea [for the series] years and years ago when we were shooting ‘The Walking Dead.’ He used to compare it to ‘Kung Fu’ or ‘A Man Called Bronson’ or even ‘The Fugitive’ or ‘The Incredible Hulk’ because in all those episodes you have this character who’s wandering around on his own, comes into contact with a group of people and by the end of the episode, those people are changed and our character has changed.”

The European setting offers differences from the stateside series as well.

“What we discover as the show progresses is the French have a very different perspective on the [walking] dead,” Nicotero said “There’s a lot of Romanticism in Europe, there’s a lot of religion, so everybody’s perceptions of how do they pay tribute to the dead [are different]. Do they respect them? I also think that because we’re dealing with groups of people who might be a bit more medically advanced than anybody that we really came across in ‘The Walking Dead’ that we get a few hints at other applications to the zombie apocalypse.”

While those French zombies don’t have an accent, zut alors!, they do cause live human flesh to sizzle at their touch, something viewers haven’t seen before. Nicotero calls them burners, a zombie mutation with veins pulsating all over their faces.

And stay tuned for zombie musicians in a future episode.

“Daryl Dixon” was originally envisioned as a vehicle for both Reedus and McBride’s Carol until McBride bowed out of the first season, but one senses she will show up at some point during the series’ run.

“We play into Daryl getting himself into a little bit of a pickle,” Nicotero teased, “which opens up the opportunity for someone to come in and save him or find him or look for him.”

Regional crime on Very Local

Hearst’s Very Local streaming service brings back its “Hometown Tragedy” true crime series for a fourth season next week with the premiere episode about a Western Pennsylvania case.

Each episode is based on a criminal case in a market where Hearst has TV stations with local reporters/anchors appearing in episodes tied to the market.

For the 22-minute Sept. 13 episode, “The Greensburg 6,” WTAE-TV anchor Mike Clark sets the scene for the story of six roommates convicted of the 2010 murder of mentally disabled 30-year-old Jennifer Daugherty of Mt. Pleasant.

Daugherty’s sister, Joy Burkholder, is the primary voice in this narrator-free episode that also includes clips from WTAE reports by former Channel 4 reporter Jennifer Miele and the voice of former anchor Sally Wiggin alongside the recollections of lead investigator Jerry Vernail and former Westmoreland County forensic detective Adam Jack.