Dead City Review: Maggie and Negan Walking Dead Spinoff Is the Best Yet

"In death, the city is so much more alive than it ever was," says a denizen of the undead urban hellscape that is post-apocalyptic New York City in The Walking Dead: Dead City. Creator and showrunner Eli Jorné describes the zombie-mobbed metropolis setting as a "new character" in the Maggie and Negan Walking Dead spinoff, premiering June 15th on AMC+ and June 18th on AMC. "It's The Walking Dead like you've never seen it before," according to Jorné, a writer and co-executive producer on AMC's long-running zombie drama that ended after 11 seasons in November. Based on the six-episode first season screened for critics, Dead City is bigger, badder, bloodier — and better than any Walking Dead spinoff so far.

The fifth series in AMC's Walking Dead Universe — after Fear the Walking Dead, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, and Tales of the Walking Dead — is the first Walking Dead offshoot stemming from the original show. Dead City is also the first of three new Walking Dead spinoffs starring the original show's returning cast members, with The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon premiering later in 2023 and The Walking Dead: Rick & Michonne slated for 2024.

Dead City picks up years after enemies Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) reached an uneasy understanding on The Walking Dead's "Rest in Peace" series finale. A contrite Negan apologized for bludgeoning Maggie's husband, Glenn (Steven Yeun), with his brains-bashing baseball bat Lucille, but Maggie told him she couldn't forgive or forget. Not even after she entrusted Negan to save her and Glenn's son, Hershel.

But when The Croat (Željko Ivanek) — a psychopathic torturer too extreme for even Negan's Saviors — kidnaps Hershel (Logan Kim, replacing Kien Michael Spiller), Maggie tracks down Negan to save her son. "You're the last person that I wanted to ask for help," Maggie says for reasons that this review can't spoil. (For fans who think it unimaginable — blasphemous, even — for a Walking Dead spinoff to pair Maggie with Glenn's killer, there's a compelling explanation forcing these two characters back together.)

They agree to a quid pro quo: Negan will travel with Maggie into New York City to save Hershel, and she shelters his unspeaking ward, the enigmatic Ginny (Mahina Napoleon). Negan is a wanted man, and his relentless pursuer is New Babylon Marshal Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles). The Grey's Anatomy alum is well-cast as the uncompromising Armstrong, bringing to mind Tommy Lee Jones' hard-assed Deputy U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard in The Fugitive. He's judge, jury, and death-by-zombie executioner, reciting code violations like scripture as he doles out what the New Babylon Federation deems justice.

Dead City is at its best when entrenching Maggie and Negan in the vendetta they thought was laid to rest on The Walking Dead. Cohan and Morgan, who share top billing, are equally serviced and equally exceptional. Maggie wrestles with letting go of her hatred that's driven a wedge between her and the angst-ridden Hershel, and proximity to her husband's killer brings on Negan-induced nightmares about Glenn's death. And Negan — who was an expecting father with his wife Annie (Medina Senghore) when last we saw him — is remorseful but believes he's paid for what he's done. He's sympathetic to Maggie more than we've ever seen him, and her to him, yet there's still a sense that Maggie and Negan could kill each other at any moment. As they begrudgingly work side by side, tension ramps up to put Maggie and Negan at each other's throats — sometimes literally — as Jorné has deftly figured out a way to wring out and mine more drama from this compellingly dysfunctional duo. 

"After all these years, you still think I'm the bad guy. I'm not. No one is. But you know what, Maggie? Maybe everyone is," Negan tells her. "Ask yourself one question: how many husbands and fathers have you killed?" As Armstrong figures out, they don't live in black and white — but shades of gray. These characters are complex, and their morality is more and more blurred the deeper Maggie and Negan get into Dead City.

The tourists take Manhattan with the help of street-smart survivors Amaia (Karina Ortiz) and Tommaso (Jonathan Higginbotham), native New Yorkers who fearlessly zipline between rooftops to bypass the horde of "fleshies" massed on the streets below. The Croat's marauder "Burazi" — his barbaric brotherhood of deranged degenerates — have locked down the island, preying on Amaia and Tommaso's tight-knit Tribe left to fend for themselves ever since the military bombed and quarantined the island to contain the infection in the early days of the outbreak.

"You get on the island, but you don't get off," says Tommaso, seemingly unaware characters travel freely between the island and the mainland. "The first few weeks were the worst. It spread so fast — through the subways, the buildings, bodies coming up from the ground, falling from the sky," Amaia explains, recounting how the Army abandoned the city's population of eight-plus million. "We watched them blow up the bridges and the tunnels, leaving us in this death trap." Dead City is The Walking Dead mashed with Mad Max and Escape from New York, which truly is The Walking Dead Universe as you've never seen it before. (Even the key art, showing Maggie and Negan with Lady Liberty's zombified head, recalls Escape's iconic poster.)

That Dead City doesn't flash back to New York's descent into apocalyptic anarchy at the onset of societal collapse is a missed opportunity. The fall is at least glimpsed through Dead City's animated opening credits sequence, beautifully rendered by main title designer Picturemill (Succession, AMC's Preacher). Evoking the style of Huge Design's graphic novel and Edgar Allen Poe-inspired title sequence that opened The Walking Dead from Season 9 onward, it incorporates striking imagery: The Empire State Building piercing through billowing clouds of black smoke from a burning city. Times Square in tatters. Blood-splattered subway stations. Tanks and helicopters blasting the city to fiery rubble. NYC is a hellish warzone, overrun by an undead army sprawled across entire city blocks. Composer Ian Hultquist (I Know What You Did Last Summer, Night Teeth) has crafted a pulse-pounding opening theme befitting the mean streets of New York and the dark and edgy Dead City.

The dead and decaying city is brought to life by production designer Scott P. Murphy, the three-time Emmy-nominated Sopranos art director who also worked on the Marvel TV series Daredevil and The Punisher, set on the grimy and gritty streets of Hell's Kitchen. Some 15 years post-zombie outbreak, Manhattan Island is an Isle of the Dead (the show's original title). Nature has reclaimed the concrete jungle overtaken by overgrowth. Buildings are crumbling. Lifeless skyscrapers loom over streets teeming with millions of walkers. The city that never sleeps is eerily quiet except for the groans of the roaming horde.

Visually, Dead City's urban environments resemble HBO's dystopian drama The Last of Us more than The Walking Dead. Taking these characters out of rural woods and putting them against the backdrop of iconic New York landmarks like the blown-apart Brooklyn Bridge, the zombie-swarmed Madison Square Garden, and the decomposing Statue of Liberty makes for an impressive sight — and a welcome change of scenery, with scenes set on stories-high rooftops to the subway tunnels and sewers below. (Squeamish? There's a skin-crawling sequence with a cockroach infestation, and another where someone squirms beneath a gnawing walker with a live rat inside its mouth.)

Dead City has everything you want from The Walking Dead. The special effects make-up by Walking Dead zombie guru Greg Nicotero and his KNB EFX Group Inc. is outstanding, especially a practical puppet monstrosity that is the coolest walker ever created in this universe. It has enough guts, gore, and undead action to make up for what The Last of Us lacked, while telling a story exploring themes of grief, loss, and trauma.

At six episodes, the show is nimbly paced with taut storytelling. It's not until midway through the season finale, titled "Doma Smo," that Dead City stumbles beneath a last-minute twist and meta-commentary from The Dama (Lisa Emery). "The show started out with a bang. But then there was a plot twist," she says in part [spoilers redacted]. "So, naturally, the ending fizzled — and let's face it, everyone knows the ending is all that matters." The ending isn't all that matters, but it is anticlimactic. 

There have already been talks of Dead City Season 2, and the final scenes make it clear that this is not a limited series. (The ending suggests a post-apocalyptic riff on The Warriors, the 1979 film about warring New York gangs.) To quote Escape from New York: "Once you go in, you don't come out." Once you go into Dead City, you won't want to come out.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

The Walking Dead: Dead City premieres Sunday, June 18th, at 9 p.m. ET on AMC.