Bravo’s new crime anthology Dirty John is based on the podcast from Los Angeles Times crime reporter Chris Goffard, and it detailed the case of Orange County mom and successful interior designer Debra Newell and her seduction by “Dirty” John Meehan, a guy with a treacherous track record when it came to women.

AMC

Connie Britton, who recently finished work on the Fox Ryan Murphy series 9-1-1, stars as Debra while Eric Bana plays the sociopath Meehan. Goffard’s podcast detailed how AMC’s The Walking Dead served as an inspiration for Newell and her daughters (played by Juno Temple and Julia Garner) in regards to their survival. Without spoiling too much, let’s just say there’s a lot of fighting techniques to be learned on The Walking Dead.

However Dirty John EP Alexandra Cunningham told reporters today that The Walking Dead won’t be factoring into the new Bravo series which began shooting on the Universal lot today, but zombies certainly will, wink wink.

“Luckily for us The Walking Dead hasn’t cornered the market on zombies. Zombies are in the culture in a way that we can access besides the show,” said Cunningham, “We will have zombies in the show. We just won’t be name checking The Walking Dead. I would never leave out the zombie part because it is integral to what happens.”

Simply put, Bravo is a competing network to AMC (they use to both be owned by Rainbow Media before Bravo was sold to NBC in 2002), and can’t use The Walking Dead as freely as the Newells did. Bravo hasn’t set an air date for Dirty John. Bravo committed to two season, but the creators haven’t broken story on what their second season case will be.