It’s not been the best of years for the long-running The Walking Dead, with ratings declining and fan frustration with one or two of the storylines growing.

There’s going to be a change in personnel for the next season of the show, it’s already been announced, with Scott M Gimple stepping away as hands-on showrunner to oversee the broader The Walking Dead universe and spin-offs instead.

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly ahead of this weekend’s season finale, Gimple has hinted that big changes lie ahead, and that the next season of the show will be very different.

“This show will be very much a new show next year and with a bigger, new narrative”, he explained.

“It was something I was really excited about getting into even before season eight. And so there was just a certain weight in the air of the kind of conclusion that we were getting closer to. It was a weird graduation for everybody”.

It sounds as though lots of storylines are set to be wrapped up, leaving a clearer path for new showrunner Angela Kang. It might just be the drastic movie to arrest the show’s decline that The Walking Dead needs…