Was The Walking Dead's Dead City Spinoff Worth It?

Jun 15, 2023

Walking Dead: Dead City marks the beginning of AMC's new era of zombie apocalypse content, but does Maggie and Negan's spinoff fulfill its purpose?

The Walking Dead: Dead City represented a new dawn for AMC's long-running zombie franchise, but the not-so-small question of whether Maggie and Negan's spinoff breathed new life into The Walking Dead, or stumbled over its own rotting feet, must still be answered. To say that AMC is taking a massive risk on The Walking Dead in 2023 would be a herd-sized understatement. Most TV shows that experience the viewership slump The Walking Dead suffered after a decade onscreen get gently put to pasture, to be revived 20 years later once the nostalgia factor kicks in. AMC had different ideas. The Walking Dead was canceled, and three brand-new shows took its place.

Although not The Walking Dead's first spinoff - indeed, not its second or third either - The Walking Dead: Dead City was the first test of AMC's new undead content strategy. Starring Lauren Cohan's Maggie and Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Negan, Dead City was the first spinoff to air following the main show's conclusion, and the first to feature familiar faces from the outset. As such, the entire future of AMC's officially-branded "Walking Dead Universe" rested on the backs of Maggie and Negan's new show. With season 1 now officially in the books, The Walking Dead: Dead City not only shows how the franchise is changing, but also whether the risk was worth it.

Related: The Walking Dead: Dead City - Returning Cast & New Character Guide

From the moment Negan's baseball bat came crashing down upon Glenn's skull, The Walking Dead gradually saw a slow decline in viewership and critical enthusiasm, ebbing from a cable phenomenon to an ailing survivor of the big 2010s zombie boom. Ending The Walking Dead in favor of launching multiple spinoffs was effectively AMC's reset button - a chance to revamp its post-apocalyptic property and bring eyes back to Robert Kirkman's world once again. By that measure, The Walking Dead: Dead City was a modest success.

Maggie and Negan's trip to New York may not have dragged The Walking Dead back to its mid-2010s glory days - a feat nobody realistically expected - but it did become the biggest cable drama debut of 2023 so far. The Walking Dead: Dead City also has the honor of being the biggest debut ever for AMC+, the network's in-house streaming platform. AMC reported 972,000 viewers for the cable premiere, rising to 2 million when taking into account simulcasts, replays, etc (via AMC). Given how much time has passed since The Walking Dead was last attracting positive headlines for viewership figures, those numbers can only count as a win for the franchise and AMC.

From another perspective, The Walking Dead: Dead City's statistical post-mortem offers no suggestion that lapsed fans are being tempted back. Maggie and Negan's story required minimal knowledge of The Walking Dead's past, acting as the perfect reentry point, but comparing Dead City figures to The Walking Dead season 11 indicates limited joy in that regard. AMC has, predictably, not confirmed the spinoff's budget publicly, but with a slim six-episode season, a considerably smaller cast, and The Walking Dead: Dead City season 2 officially confirmed, the franchise's foray into New York City appears to have pleased those behind-the-scenes at AMC towers.

Related: Dead City Season 2 - Everything We Know About The Walking Dead Spinoff's Future

Filmed largely in Georgia, The Walking Dead's gritty rural aesthetic immediately became an integral ingredient in AMC's zombie broth, generating an isolated, suspenseful arena where a zombie could be lurking behind any tree, and buildings to scavenge were few and far between. As the seasons - and the spinoffs - carried on coming, however, The Walking Dead's backdrops became increasingly anonymous. One stretch of dense vegetation bled into the next, and each long, dusty road became impossible to distinguish from the others. One aspect for which The Walking Dead: Dead City has earned near-universal acclaim is its visual style.

Substituting Georgia grime for New York neon, Maggie and Negan entered a dense urban landscape that refreshed The Walking Dead's palette entirely. Viewers may have needed an agile finger on their device's brightness slider, but Dead City offered gorgeous geography galore, not only standing apart from The Walking Dead, but coming across vastly more cinematic to boot. Nowhere was this more obvious than in Maggie and Negan's final fight - an epic clash atop a Manhattan docks catwalk as flesh-hungry undead squirmed below. Compared to Negan's final battle against Rick, a scrap next to a tree in an otherwise empty field, the improvement is clear.

The Walking Dead: Dead City begins AMC's new stretch of spinoffs on a bright note, but that strong start doesn't necessarily eclipse the red flags. Arguably the reddest and waviest of said flags is a clear reliance on tried-and-tested storylines and narrative beats. The overarching Maggie and Negan feud - a begrudging team-up where Maggie struggled to see past Negan murdering her husband - already played out across The Walking Dead season 11. Dead City dusted off that storyline, then put Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan on more or less the same emotional journey. On both occasions, Maggie and Negan found some level of understanding whilst acknowledging full forgiveness as a step too far.

Beyond its two stars, other aspects of The Walking Dead: Dead City's story felt eerily familiar. Maggie and Negan rescuing Hershel from a shady enemy happened during The Walking Dead's Commonwealth arc. The idea of grizzled, experienced main characters rallying timid communities against common villains has been a recurring trope since Rick Grimes stepped foot in Alexandria. Even the new settlements added nothing new to The Walking Dead's formula. The Croat's villain group was, partially by design, Saviors-lite, while the New Babylon Federation seems indistinguishable from PADRE, the CRM, or the Pioneers.

Related: 5 Ways The Walking Dead: Dead City's Croat Is A Negan CopycatIronically, innovative ideas The Walking Dead: Dead City actually does have got swept under the rug far too quickly. The premiere debuted Michelle Hurd as Jones, the proprietor of a fully-functioning post-outbreak bar offering a tempting variety of vices and services. Such an establishment was entirely new for the Walking Dead universe, and a fascinatingly dark addition to its canon. Instead of pulling on that intriguing thread, the spinoff killed Jones in episode 1 and the bar was never mentioned again. Similarly, watching Negan play father to young Ginny had the potential to draw new shades from Jeffrey Dean Morgan's character, yet he and Mahina Napoleon spent almost the entirety of season 1 apart.

The Walking Dead: Dead City may have come with an impressive new coat of paint, but peel off that veneer, and the underneath feels like more of the same. Keeping the zombie apocalypse fresh has been a constant battle for The Walking Dead; Maggie and Negan's spinoff would suggest that problem has only been half-solved. The challenge now falls to The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon and The Ones Who Live, AMC's upcoming Rick & Michonne spinoff, to maintain Dead City's striking visual leap while also making a similarly drastic evolution with storylines and characters.

AMC's "Walking Dead Universe" rebrand signals a shift away from the traditional model of parent-show-and-spinoffs, and toward a shared universe-style format - the latest in a long line of lucrative properties to try and emulate Marvel's success with the MCU. As Kevin Feige knows all too well, however, shared universes walk a devilishly tricky balance between making each entry feel distinct, yet still tying them together in a cohesive way. Directors and writers often bring their own ideas to a project rather than following the bigger franchise picture, and one look at Marvel's Phase 4 multiverse confusion shows how difficult appeasing both ends of that spectrum can be.

By ignoring major questions set up in other Walking Dead TV shows, Dead City has already slammed headfirst into that shared universe trap, with zombie variants by far the most blatant and confusing omission. Officially debuting in The Walking Dead: World Beyond, The Walking Dead season 11 then caught the ball and showed variants growing in number among the zombie population. Taking place some years later, variants should be rampant in The Walking Dead: Dead City - especially a zombie-infested New York - yet not a single one is invited to Maggie and Negan's party.

Related: The Walking Dead's NEW Zombie Variant ExplainedBy the same token, The Walking Dead: Dead City ignored previously-established franchise uber-villains the Civic Republic Military in favor of adding entirely new communities. While the CRM storyline is undoubtedly being saved for Rick and Michonne's spinoff, some acknowledgment of the villainous group would have brought a welcome string of continuity between Dead City and the wider Walking Dead franchise - especially since the CRM has a confirmed presence in the New York area. That Walking Dead: Dead City creator Eli Jorné may not wish to be beholden to existing storylines is understandable, but ignoring plot points teased previously is the quickest way to undermine a shared universe-style franchise.

The CRM's day will come eventually, with a big role in The Ones Who Live in the calendar for 2024. Variants, on the other hand, look to be a natural fit for The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. AMC's next spinoff takes Norman Reedus' crossbow-wielding badass to France, which is where The Walking Dead: World Beyond revealed the zombie outbreak - as well as zombie variants - originated from. Whether upcoming spinoffs address these long-running stories or continue to push them aside will carry considerable weight in the ongoing debate over whether The Walking Dead's future as a shared universe spread across multiple TV shows will work.

Sources: AMC.