Timeline The Walking Dead eng

click here for the timeline in English      

Always intrigued by the precise definition of the time of the series, over the years I have collected many clues and more or less hidden traces online that have allowed me to build a sort of personal calendar of The Walking Dead Universe.

This kind of fascination with the real temporal placement of events pushed me to create a Timeline, which includes all the events of The Walking Dead, of the three spinoffs Fear The Walking Dead, The Walking Dead World Beyond, Tales of the Walking Dead and of the webseries.

It is not a static realization but in continuous evolution, which is updated following the course of the various seasons and that includes also the new released series as the one dedicated to Daryl set in France, Dead City which sees Maggie and Negan as protagonists in Manhattan and TWD The Ones Who Live, the spin-off about the two main characters that has replaced the long-announced Rick film trilogy.

Gathered all the information collected online, I created a file that showed exactly months and years in which the events took place, as everything existing on the net always spoke only of a sum of the past days, therefore a little difficult to place in an ideal calendar.

The most precise clue from which I figured it all out from was the writing you see on a banner ad in FTWD season one So close, yet so far when Trevis, Chris and Liza flee a street demonstration in Los Angeles, and which reports as the date of an event that of August 7th, 2010 (...). Whether it is future or just past, we are around those days.
So it was enough to calculate everything from there.
Another shot took me a little off the road, and forced me to do some recalculations; when Nick escapes from the hospital, he is framed in a screen of the internal security cameras, which shows the date of February 4th, 2015 (...). This intrigued me, as it was totally out of time, then I found out that the pilot episode of FTWD had been shot in February 2015, realizing that it was an oversight in the filming phase and then slipped away in post-editing. 

Always taking into consideration the fact that it seems quite unlikely that after years in the midst of a planetary apocalypse, the characters are still able to keep an accurate account of the time that passes, many errors, oversights or miscalculations have appeared over the seasons.
Such as that of the month of October that appears on a wall calendar during the episode Skidmark of season five of FTWD (...), while in fact at that moment we were in March, although this could be explained as a sort of Daniel's "desire for normality" which simply pushed him to leaf through the pages of a calendar, day after day as was done in the everyday life of a now lost world.
Or the thesis that twelve years have passed since the beginning of the apocalypse indicated in the episode This is Negan of season ten of TWD, while in reality it has been just over ten years (at this time of the series), or still in the same episode the screen image of Lucille's cell phone that shows the date of November 12th (...), while in reality the period would have been more or less that of May.

A further error appears in the second episode of TWD The Ones Who Live, in which an indication states six years after the bridge, when in reality the years that have passed at that moment are seven. If it were six years after the bridge we would be more or less at the point where Judith saves Magna and her group, and the night of the heads on pikes happens, while what we see is Michonne having just left Virgil's island, which happens a year after the events mentioned above.​ 

Confirmation that my calculations were correct however came in the first episode of TWDWB when Elton while at school, takes notes in a notebook writing the date of August 19th (...).
We are on the eve of the tenth commemoration of Monument Day which recalls the day when "the sky fell" after the outbreak of the apocalypse (it would be the day when the metropolises were bombed), therefore on August 20th, 2010.

The conclusion of the second season of World Beyond gave me further and definitive confirmation; it is established that the last day of WB was Monday, October 26th, 2020 (...), as it is established that the events of that day happened about two months after the tenth celebration of Monument Day, which from my Timeline was August 20th, 2020. Everything coincides.
Also Jadis in the episode Who are you? as she talks to Huck she confirms that she has been a member of CRM for six years and that to get to the position she is now she had to consign an important friend of hers (Rick).
If we consider the moment of Rick's disappearance (November 2013), and the time it took for Jadis to be able to get into CRM's favor (one year I think is the right compromise), the Timeline also fits perfectly with that of TWD.

Yet another confirmation of the accuracy of my Timeline came with the latest web series FTWD - Dead in the Water, where a shot shows the ultrasound of Riley's newborn stuck in front of a telex strip, indicating the child’s date of birth of which only the figures 0/10 are shown (…).
Considering the american way to express the date with the month written before the day, considering that the events are taking place during Operation Cobalt (USS Pennsylvania has been asked to launch a missile on Chicago), considering that we have already ascertained with certainty that Operation Cobalt happened on August 20th, 2010 (notes taken at school by Elton in WB (...)) and considering that the baby has already been born a few days ago (when Riley talks to his wife on the phone, the home answering machine answers, so she is no longer in hospital), but not for long (his companions are still wishing him well), the child can only be born on August 10th, 2010 (08/10/10).

A very precise clue is finally provided in the third episode of TWD The Ones Who Live, where it is clearly shown that the night of Michonne's escape attempt from Philadelphia organized by Rick, is exactly on Tuesday, February 1st, 2022 (...).
And again in the fourth episode Michonne says that RJ is "almost eight". It's February 2022 and RJ was born in the summer of 2014.

Again the dates fit together perfectly.

There are also countless other clues hidden here and there in the images of the show, and many statements made during interviews on talk shows and television broadcasts, but the most important source from which I took verified information is the article by Alyce Wax (see below in sources), AMC producer of the documentary The Walking Dead: The Journey So Far about the first six seasons of TWD.

Vincenzo Mei

main sources
A. Wox, 'The Walking Dead' Timeline, Explained, Apr 13,2020, Collider
D. Patten, Jeffrey Dean Morgan & Lauren Cohan, Nov 20, 2022, Deadline
Inside The Walking Dead: Dead City Presented By SERVPRO | Show Me More, Jul 24, 2023, AMC
AMC, Talking Dead
Comic-Con San Diego
New York Comic-Con