The Walking Dead's backstage drama revealed in expletive-filled e-mails

Former showrunner Frank Darabont has filed a lawsuit against AMC alleging he and his agents were denied rightful profit participation from the show

The Walking Dead may be one of TV's biggest moneyspinners - it's likely grossed more than $1 billion so far - but its behind-the-scenes drama paints a far less prosperous picture.

Specifically, in tension between former showrunner Frank Darabont and The Walking Dead's network AMC, which ended in Darabont being dropped from the series; he, in turn, retaliated with a lawsuit claiming $280 million in damages, after alleging he and his agents were denied rightful profit participation from the show.

After the show first premiered in October 2010 to 5 million viewers, which has since climbed to 17 million, AMC decided to slash the second season's budget by 25 percent. A decision which did not go down well with Darabont, himself the Oscar-nominated writer and director of The Shawshank Redemption.

The Hollywood Reporter states things only went downhill from there, with AMC's response to Darabont's attempt to cut costs by utilising a single location being a demand to see the entire season's set of scripts before shooting began, something that it supposedly "unheard of" in the industry.

Darabont certainly didn't hold back, especially when early footage began rolling in and he wasn't pleased with what he saw. In 2011, he e-mailed Gale Anne Hurd and others with: "F*ck you all for giving me chest pains because of the staggering f*cking incompetence, blindness to the important beats, and the beyond-arrogant lack of regard for what is written being exhibited on set every day."

"I deserve better than a heart attack because people are too stupid to read a script and understand the words. Does anybody disagree with me? Then join the C-cam operator and go find another job that doesn’t involve deliberately f*cking up my show scene by scene."

The torrent of abrasive insults continued; Darabont demanded to know why camera operators were being paid when "Ray Charles could operate better", and compared one of the show's directors to a former co-worker who had suffered massive debilitating strokes. "It's like we yanked some kid with no experience out of high school and put her in charge of directing a show," he wrote.

To an AMC excutive, he wrote: "Please let's stop invoking 'the writers room'. There IS no writers room, which you know as well as I do. I am the writers room. The f*cking lazy assholes who were supposedly going to be my showrunners threw that responsibility on me after wasting five months of my time.”

Darabont was fired days after sending the latter e-mail, with the e-mails now coming to surface as part of the lawsuit against AMC. The network's lawyer wrote about the decision: "Darabont’s erratic and unprofessional performance and his behavioural and interpersonal issues during Season 2 raised a number of concerns for AMC Studios."

"Among other things, his failure to timely deliver scripts, failure to adequately supervise the writers’ room, and his volatile and disturbing interactions with staff and talent were impacting production."

"Each of these emails must be considered in context," Darabont has stated in his own defence in an affidavit. "They were sent during an intense and stressful two-year period of work during which I was fighting like a mother lion to protect the show from harm — not only on my own behalf, but ironically also on behalf of AMC."

The Walking Dead season 8 will premiere later this year.