AMC’s upcoming limited series “The Walking Dead: Dead City” faces a challenge of credibility that has nothing to do with its zombies or fantastical setting.
Rather, it’s the building of a series centered around two people – Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the latter famously killing the former’s husband, Glenn (Steven Yeun).
That famed onscreen death hit when “The Walking Dead” was at its peak ratings-wise, the show’s numbers dwindled with time even as Negan found some redemption.
The pair were able to work together in the show’s final season, though not without some blatant hostility. Even so, there are a lot of questions regarding how the show will work.
Speaking with SFX Magazine (via Slashfilm), Morgan says his Negan has “gone backwards a little bit” at the start of the new series with Maggie still hostile toward him:
“I also think there’s some frustration that he has, like, ‘I’ve tried to apologize. I have tried to do the best I can for the last ten years, and we’ve gotten nowhere. And I still think if I close my eyes, you’re gonna put a shank through my head.'”
Cohan says the forgiveness Negan seeks isn’t really a possibility, no matter what comes their way:
“I wouldn’t even use the word forgiveness. It’s way too impossible. But what I think was really exciting, definitely for me to do, was just to say, ‘Have we ever really talked about this?’
At the end of the day, it’s been 15 years into the end of the world. There have been other generations trying to rebuild lives. But when you try to rebuild a life, and you’re so defined by such traumatic things, who are you? What are you? How do you behave? How do you interact with anybody, let alone somebody who you have a lot of beef with?”
Showrunner Eli Jorné says the aim of the series is to be an exploration of grief from all angles, looking at the loss “not just for the person who lost him, but the person who did it.”
The Manhattan-set series premieres on AMC and AMC+ on June 18th.
