Season premiere of “The Walking Dead” expands, as well as AMC’s original programming slate

by Karl J. Paloucek

Well, AMC may be having to sit on production of Mad Men for the moment, but that hasn’t stopped the network from broadening its assets. Today, AMC announced that another of its ambitious series, The Walking Dead, will commence its 13-episode Season 2 with a special 90-minute premiere Oct. 16 as the start of its annual two-week Fearfest celebration.

More spectacularly, AMC has also announced the greenlighting of two new original series. Both are still only provisionally titled, but are as conceptually compelling as anything the network has dished out so far, from Breaking Bad to Rubicon. (Sorry, AMC — still smarting from the loss of that one.).

Secret Stash, executive produced by director Kevin Smith, is actually set in Smith’s iconic comic shop Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, and is an unscripted show chronicling the idiosyncratic world of fanboys and comic-book enthusiasts that frequent it. The staff, the customers, the people who just come in to hang out and talk, trade and just take in the smell of it all — Secret Stash aims to capture it all, from the everyday banality of shop life to the exhilaration and ecstasy of Comic-Con. Six one-hour episodes will constitute the first season and will air early next year.

Possibly even more left of field is JJK Security, a “Southern gothic workplace dramedy” in the storytelling mold of the Coen Brothers, Christopher Guest and Robert Altman. Centered on a rural Georgian,  family-owned private security company and the wildly diverse characters that inhabit its ranks. Each episode hangs on the frame of an ongoing investigation, but the series is more about the exaggerated characters and their peculiar relationships to each other and the business that binds them all together. Season 1, consisting of eight half-hour episodes, is currently slated to premiere in the third quarter of 2012.

All of this sounds great. Now if we could only figure out what’s happening with Don Draper and his new wife.

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Credit: Gene Page/AMC