New Walking Dead show Dead City is best when it forgets it’s a spinoff

Walking Dead is a franchise that has a wide range of zombie series. There are 11 seasons for the main show, 8 seasons for the companion series and a variety of spinoffs, either running now or planned, in development. It’s such a cultural staple, with its shock value having mutated into by-the-numbers mayhem, that refreshing it on a conceptual level seems impossible. But The Walking Dead Dead CityThe film is only halfway successful. Its thematic power is built solely on how much you’re willing to care about the emotional trauma of characters in The Walking DeadIt is still early, but the best moments are when they leave behind their old world.

Dead City sees Lauren Cohan return as Maggie — who, aside from a brief detour into other projects, has been a reliable mainstay of the show since season 2 — teaming up with Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan, a character who began the series in the final moments of season 6 as a vile warlord bashing in beloved characters’ heads with a baseball bat. Through some fairly laborious seasons, he’d evolve into a will-he/won’t-he sort of antihero, the kind of guy with a warped code of ethics who’s willing to play along with the good guys if it means not getting eaten or shot.

So they’re a bit of an odd couple, even if you ignore the fact that one of those baseball bat’d heads belonged to Maggie’s late husband, Glenn, the most likable character that the franchise ever produced. Glenn and Maggie’s kid, Hershel, has recently been kidnapped, leaving Maggie to seek Negan’s help in the rescue mission.

The Walking DeadThe majority of the film was shot in humid Southeast where rural landscapes were often replaced by shots showing massive zombie hordes roaming across fields and pastures. Dead CityThe Walking Dead takes place in a more cramped Manhattan, which is actually New Jersey. However, you can forgive the discrepancy if the buildings are above three stories. Dead CityThe characters rush on top of skyscrapers, and down alleyways. In the first episode, zombies plummet from rooftops in gory slapstick fashion in their attempts to snack on the heroes, which is a funny reminder of the franchise’s more curious glory days. It’s the kind of “oh, huh, I guess that The following are some of the ways to improve your own understanding. happen to the undead” touch that the franchise can pull off well when it wants to.

Photo: Peter Kramer/AMC

Photo: Peter Kramer/AMC

Photo: Peter Kramer/AMC

What isn’t a callback to those simpler times is the dynamic between Maggie and Negan, one whose efficacy demands that you still be passionate about Glenn’s murder — an event that happened back in 2016 and seemingly caused a massive drop-off in the main show’s popularity. In Walking Dead time, that’s forever ago, and with the amount of plot and sheer exposure that the franchise has run through since then, it’s almost impossible that you’ll share Maggie’s deep-rooted anger if you’ve kept up with it for this long. The show might even work best if you haven’t, and the wounds of Glenn’s demise have yet to heal. Negan, on the other hand, no longer has that brutal edge he had when he first appeared. Since then, he’s been a playable member in a Tekken game. If anything, he is now The Walking Dead’s particularly vicious uncle. He’s been around so long that you’re less likely to worry about his attempt at a redemption arc and more likely to see him as a homicidal lil’ scamp.

This doesn’t render the characters inept. Cohan brings world-weariness to Maggie that’s fitting, seeing as she’s one of the longest-living survivors of AMC’s evergreen apocalypse. Morgan is Negan and he’s almost like an evil Greek chorus. Dead City’s violence and action sequences, to the extent that he’ll actually comment on how cool or awful something is with fair frequency. Together, they have a haggard yet charismatic dynamic: two people that don’t get along, but God, when you’ve made it this far and you’re around someone that doesn’t either want to stab you or devour your flesh, ya gotta take it as kind of a win.

It’s a simple main cast, and its best moments clearly recall another “get into a dystopian Manhattan and get out with someone” piece of media: John Carpenter’s Escape to New York. In that film, which saw “Snake” Plissken infiltrate NYC to nab the president and get out before the “Duke” that runs the prison-city guns him down, character relationships feel both well worn and bare bones. Snake, or at least his identity, is well-known to most characters. Dead City — which is prone to diving into multiple past-revealing monologues per episode with its side characters — their histories are left to simmer and brood. It makes for immaculate pacing (Carpenter famously excised a lengthy prologue scene that gave Snake more backstory), and the moody atmosphere is only heightened by everyone’s gritted-teeth anxiety around one another.

Photo: Peter Kramer/AMC

At its very best, Dead City can feel like that, especially when it gets around to introducing the main antagonist for the series — the Croat, played with scene-eating relish by Željko Ivanek. Walking Dead antagonists usually follow a similar pattern, which is characterized by a sullen intensity and subsequently brusque breakdown. To be honest, many characters, good or bad, take this route. Ivanek infuses Croat with a crude and cheeky evilness that is evident from the very beginning. In this way, he’s the prime antagonist for a series that thrives when it doesn’t have much to say and exists on the power of Feel the vibrations. It would be cruel to expect The Walking Dead 2023 film to match the John Carpenter classic, but it does seem like it. Escape’s Duke, a man who is all bizarre personality and disturbed urges, and works best when we don’t have to explain too much.

It’s a lot of people chasing people — Negan himself is being pursued by post-apocalyptic law enforcement, namely Perlie Armstrong, played with appropriate surliness by Gaius Charles — and whenever it decides to dip into other aspects of The Walking Dead’s now-expanded universe or fit into its wider frame, things slow to a crawl. The narrative of this show is driven by the need to keep things moving. Even the little insights we’re given into the communities formed in Manhattan serve as a diversion (Maggie’s son has been kidnapped by a maniac! It should have moved faster. The stakes are high at the end.

Obviously, we’d like to be emotionally attached to the people that are getting munched on, but in a series built so heavily and yet so precariously on the most famous death in the franchise, we don’t necessarily need to be anywhere but with Maggie and Negan in New York City. The Walking Dead Dead City works best when it forgets that it’s part of The Walking Dead.