Many people were understandably caught off guard that The Walking Dead even had to postpone its finale in the first place, given that the entire season has been airing since October of last year and filming had long since concluded. The fact that the finale still had some postproduction work to go is a fascinating insight into the way that TV works.
All television productions are fundamentally different beasts. Traditional networks, cable channels, and streaming services all handle their properties in varying ways. Netflix has boasted that they have months worth of future content signed, sealed, delivered, and ready to go with few delays anticipated. Networks like The CW on the other hand, continue production on their shows as seasons air, largely due to the inflated episode count. This has led to mass cancellations and delays across the landscape on the lower channels.
The Walking Dead appears to have gone with a hybrid approach, in which filming is completed shortly after the season premieres, but a host of postproduction responsibilities remain. As a sci-fi-oriented show, The Walking Dead clearly requires a lot of editing and visual effects. That much is expected and easy to understand. Few of us, however, likely realized that that process can last until only weeks before the final episode is set to premiere.
The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang explained the reasoning for the delay to EW shortly after news of it broke:
“We have people around the world that work on our VFX and so people were having to start moving things remotely. But there’s just certain parts of the post-process that are very difficult to move remotely, and everything that moves remotely works slower because it’s like rendering these giant effects. If you don’t know that technical language, it’s like once they finish the stuff, the machines basically work on it to spit out a beautiful version of it, which we drop into the show. Everything just takes longer. And there’s certain processes that couldn’t be moved before California shutdown for business. And it just couldn’t be done.”
