As announced at Comic-Con last year, Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell's Evil Dead franchise is chainsawing its way to television in the mutated form of a series called Ash Vs. Evil Dead. Campbell will be returning to the role of the hapless hero Ash, and the show will air on Starz, the home of Spartacus and Black Sails. After a period of secrecy, details are starting to emerge, now including the revelation by Starz's honcho Chris Albrecht that we're, perhaps surprisingly, looking at 30-minute episodes.
"The half-hour idea was their idea," Albrecht told IGN, with "their" referring to Raimi, Campbell and executive producer Robert Tapert. It's intriguing because it suggests a format more akin to a sitcom than a Walking Dead-type drama. "But I can tell you," says Albrecht, "it's a chock full half hour!"
"It’s about as big of a counterpart to Walking Dead as you could programme," Campbell told Entertainment Weekly late last year, "because Walking Dead is unrelentingly grim and hugely popular. We’re going to give people a little of the old fashioned slapstick: horror and comedy. The beauty of Starz is there’s no content issues. Let’s face it: fans want the carnage and the mayhem. So we intend to give them quite the explosion of viscera. Most of it directed at me, unfortunately."
Campbell has also suggested that the set-up will see Ash joined in his Deadite-carving by two younger protégés, yet to be cast. "One is a male-bonding situation," he said of the current concept, "and the other is a father-figure deal, since Ash could have a daughter the same age as this character. Hopefully we’ll pull Ash out of his loner-veteran mode and get him back into being a human being again."
There have been some interweb murmurings that Ash's female sidekick could possibly be Jane Levy (or at least the character Mia), formally uniting the worlds of the original Evil Dead series and the 2013 remake. That, however, remains optimistic fan speculation for now.
The show will shoot in New Zealand, and Albrecht is confident we can expect it this year. "I think most likely it will be fourth quarter [of 2015]," he says. "End of third quarter, fourth quarter, something like that. We’ve got a lot of shows this year. We’re very, very excited.”
In a word... groovy.