It would be easy to overlook The Walking Dead's second spinoff series coming to AMC in 2020. With the original Walking Dead series now a staple of the AMC lineup and its first spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead, met with middling success, it's easy to argue there might be no reason to watch yet another entry into this growing franchise. What more is there left to explore in the zombie apocalypse?

Series creator (and Walking Dead franchise overseer) Scott M. Gimple explained in a recent interview with Deadline there are some very good reasons to tune into the new spinoff series. The main reason? This is a unique coming-of-age story with a quest element that is rooted in the Walking Dead world.

"It’s people coming of age but on a quest of sorts. The quest aspect makes it very different beyond the fact that these kids are unlike characters we’ve seen before. They’ve grown up in all of this but they’ve also grown up in relative safety. So they’re aware of the world and of walkers but they’ve grown up behind walls so they’re not out there mixing it up with the walkers and the dangers. They’ve had a very sheltered experience. They’ve also enjoyed something close to a First World kind of life. So it’s a big deal for them to experience these things. They aren’t ignorant of the world but they haven’t had to face it or deal with it as deeply as they will in the stories that we’re going to be telling."

The series stars Aliyah Royale, Nicolas Cantu, Annet Mahendru, Nico Tortorella, and Alexa Mansour as the next generation of survivors born out of the zombie apocalypse that kicked off The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead. This series puts teenagers and young adults at the center of the story, telling it through their eyes and their experience of a world where they've only ever known a life of co-existence with the undead. Things get complicated when these sheltered teens venture outside the walls of their community for the first time and encounter zombies face-to-face. According to Gimple, it's this aspect that also adds intrigue to the still-untitled spinoff.

"[These teenagers] know how horrible the world is out there and they’ve all had trauma, to some extent, because of that knowledge and the things that have happened to the world. But they're not hardened survivors. They are like characters who have been watching the show for years. Now they’re stepping into that world."

And of course, there was plenty of consideration given to finding a way of making this second spinoff its own exciting viewing experience despite its connections to the established Walking Dead series. He tells Deadline:

"The thing we wanted to avoid was sameness and the thing we wanted to embrace was distinctiveness. As we move into these new Walking Dead entertainments we want them to have their own vibe, their own voice, their own feel and really delineate from the other shows and to do it more and more."

The Walking Dead spinoff series is coming to AMC in 2020. For more on the spinoff, check out the trailer which debuted at New York Comic-Con 2019. You can watch the original Walking Dead series, now in its 10th season, every Sunday on AMC at 9/8c.