The Walking Dead: Dead City is best when it forgets it’s a Walking Dead show

With 11 seasons of a main series, eight seasons of a companion series, and several other spin-offs currently running or in the works, the Walking Dead franchise has covered a lot of ground in the zombie genre. It’s such a cultural staple, with its shock value mutated into by-the-numbers chaos, that its renewal seems impossible on a conceptual level. But The Walking Dead: Dead City tries to do so, and is half successful. The thematic strength is based solely on how much you’re willing to care about the emotional trauma of characters in it The living Dead at this late stage, but the best moments come when it leaves their former world behind.

Dead city sees Lauren Cohan return as Maggie – who, aside from a brief detour to other projects, has been a reliable mainstay of the show since season 2 – alongside Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan, a character who started the series in the final moments of the season 6 as a vicious warlord who smashes into the heads of beloved characters with a baseball bat. Over several fairly grueling seasons, he’d evolve into a will-he/don’t-want-to kind of anti-hero, the kind of guy with a twisted code of ethics who’s willing to play along with the good guys if it means he doesn’t get eaten. or shot.

So they’re a bit of an odd bunch, even ignoring the fact that one of those heads with baseball bats belonged to Maggie’s late husband, Glenn, the most lovable character the franchise has ever produced. Glenn and Maggie’s child, Hershel, has recently been kidnapped, forcing Maggie to seek Negan’s help in the rescue mission.

The living Dead For the most part, it was set in the humid southeast, where empty rural views often gave way to shots of huge hordes of zombies walking across meadows and fields. Dead city takes us to a much more claustrophobic Manhattan (New Jersey, actually, but the sight of some buildings above a few floors in The Walking Dead will make you forgive any discrepancies), so instead of farms and forests, the undead escapism of Dead city chases the characters over skyscrapers and down alleyways. In the first episode, zombies plummet from the rooftops in bloody 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 so would happen with the undead” touch that the franchise can properly execute when it wants to.

Photo: Peter Kramer/AMC

Photo: Peter Kramer/AMC

Photo: Peter Kramer/AMC

What isn’t a throwback to those simpler times is the dynamic between Maggie and Negan, one whose effectiveness requires you to still be passionate about Glenn’s murder — an event that took place in 2016 and seemingly caused a massive downturn in the main show’s popularity. In Walking Dead days, that’s gone forever, and with the amount of plot and sheer exposure the franchise has gone through since then, it’s almost impossible you’ll share Maggie’s visceral rage if you’ve kept up for this long. In fact, the show might work best if you haven’t, and the wounds from Glenn’s demise have yet to heal. On the other hand, Negan no longer has the brutal edge that he debuted with. Hell, the dude has since been a playable character in a Tekken video game. If anything, he’s now The Walking Dead’s particularly vicious uncle. He’s been around for so long that you’re less likely to worry about his attempted redemption arc and more likely to see him as a murderous petty con artist.

This does not make the characters awkward. Cohan gives Maggie world-weariness which is fitting since she is one of the longest surviving survivors of AMC’s evergreen apocalypse. Morgan, on the other hand, plays Negan as an almost sadistic Greek chorus Dead city‘s violence and action sequences, to the extent that he will actually comment on how cool or awful something is with reasonable regularity. Together they have a feral but charismatic dynamic: two people who don’t get along, but God, when you’ve come this far and you’re around someone who doesn’t want to stab you or devour your flesh, you have to take it as a kind of victory.

It’s a simple main cast, and its best moments clearly recall another “go to a dystopian Manhattan and get away with someone” piece of media: John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. In that movie, where “Snake” Plissken infiltrated NYC to apprehend the president and get out before the “Duke” who runs the prison-town shoots him, character relationships feel both worn and bare. Many characters know Snake (or at least know who he is), but differently than in Dead city — who tends to delve into multiple revealing past monologues with his side characters per episode — their history is left to simmer and brood. It maintains impeccable pacing (Carpenter cut out a famous prologue scene that gave Snake more backstory), and the moody atmosphere is only heightened by everyone’s clenched fear around each other.

Photo: Peter Kramer/AMC

In his best moments, Dead city can feel that way, especially when it comes to introducing the main antagonist for the series – the Croat, played with scene-eating relish by Željko Ivanek. Walking Dead villains usually adhere to a pattern of somber intensity followed by brutal breakdown. (Lots of characters, bad or not, go that route, to be fair.) But Ivanek infuses Croat with a kind of gross, brutal devilishness from the start. In this way, he’s the main antagonist for a series that thrives when it doesn’t have much to say and exists on the strength of mood. Expecting The Walking Dead to suddenly match a John Carpenter film in 2023 is a downright cruel question, but the Croat feels very bad Escape‘s Duke, a man who is all bizarre personality and crazy 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 chased by post-apocalyptic law enforcement, namely Perlie Armstrong, played with appropriate gruffness by Gaius Charles – and when it decides to delve into other aspects of The Walking Dead’s now expansive universe or fit into its wider frame, things creep slowly. Seeing how other settlements are doing is fun, but a story like this craves momentum. Even the little insights we get into the communities formed in Manhattan serve as a distraction (Maggie’s son has been kidnapped by a maniac! Things should move faster!) from the endpoint’s desperate commitment.

Obviously, we like to be emotionally attached to the people being chewed on, but in a series so heavy, yet so dangerous, built 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 it’s part of The Walking Dead.