Season 4 of AMC’s “The Walking Dead“ commences production in Atlanta, Georgia on Monday, May 6th. The current Season 3 is a high water mark for the historically spotty show in terms of both ratings and quality, so naturally more than a few folks are curious about the recent decision to replace the responsible showrunner, Glen Mazzara, with Scott M. Gimple (who may be even better – who knows).

Paleyfest, an annual event that offers some pretty great panels and roundtables with cast and creatives from various TV shows, held its “Walking Dead” event this past Friday and, per EW, there were some pretty interesting revelations about Season 4.

Head below to check it out! One thing to be thankful for, Rick will stop hallucinating at some point.

Greg Nicotero the increase of character moments, “I think there may be a wee bit less of the run and gun. And [we’ll] get a little more into some of our characters. The challenge with a show like this, when you have a big ensemble, is you don’t want any of the characters to get lost; it’s important that we know what Carol’s story is and that we know what Beth’s story is. And when you’re trying to service a lot of characters, it becomes challenging. Watching the first season of Walking Dead and seeing how grounded it was, that’s really important to all of us. Andy Lincoln and I spent a lot of time going through the scripts and making sure we feel that they’re grounded. Because that’s what keeps our audience coming back. The walkers and the gore and the action and stuff, that’s fun, that’s the popcorn part of it. But if you don’t have characters that people are invested in, you lose your audience.”

Robert Kirkman listens to you guys, “we have the best fans in the world. If you go to the site, you see the message boards and can find out what they like and what they don’t like. We look at that, so we know sort of what fans want and what we don’t. They’ve given us a lot of interesting ideas. We’re ultimately going to do something that’s entirely unique and ours, but the fans are going to be very happy. We get a lot of requests for zombie animals.” EP David Alpert added, jokingly, “I’m not going to rule out seeing a zombie polar bear in Season Four. Because you never know.”