AMC has set a June 18th premiere date for “The Walking Dead: Dead City,” the first of several planned limited spin-off series based around characters from the main show.
Set after the events involving the Commonwealth in that show’s eleventh and final season, the six-episode series stars Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan reprising their Maggie and Negan roles respectively.
Here the pair travel into a post-apocalyptic Manhattan, long ago cut off from the mainland. The crumbling city is filled with the dead and denizens who have made the city their own world of anarchy, beauty and terror.
Cohan, actor Gaius Charles and showrunner Eli Jorne were on hand for a panel at the WonderCon event in California today to announce the date and show off a first look teaser. Jorné said the show will be “The Walking Dead” but “like we’ve never seen it before,” saying:
“We haven’t really lived in a city like this. It’s New York; there’s skyscrapers up to the sky and a million and a half walkers. And for characters like Maggie and Negan, who’ve been running through the woods for a long time, it’s just a whole new world that’s just extremely claustrophobic, scary, and also, as you’ll discover, has pockets of survivors, you’ll get to see all the strange new ways they live in the apocalypse, it’s definitely like nothing you’ve seen before.”
The series will also explore the relationship between the pair – after all Negan killed Maggie’s husband Glenn (Steven Yeun). Talking about that, Cohan says the series gets time to really explore it:
“It’s interesting because we see a very unprocessed level of trauma that we know happened between Maggie and Negan. In Dead City, we really get a chance to [ask], ‘What is this? What does it take to move through it?’ And more than anything, it’s a chance for us to be forced together on this mission. The tension and unmovable things are still very present. We’ve seen them intersect so often, but in this show, it’s really this tunnel that they’re trapped in to face things they may have run away from, more so what Maggie has run away from and what Negan[‘s presence] brings up for her. It’s like an exercise in intimacy with the worst person.”
Jorné adds that with a lot of grief and trauma between them, the show explores how the pair have to deal with that in order to survive:
“How does Maggie look in Negan’s face every day and remember what he did to the love of her life? That’s still a huge part of the show. For anybody who’s watched the walking dead all these years and connected to those characters, we’re continuing the story, growing it, evolving it, and deepening it in a whole new landscape.”
Jonathan Higginbotham, Mahina Napoleon, Trey Santiago-Hudson, and Charlie Solis co-star in the series which comes ahead of spin-offs focusing on Daryl Dixon and on Rick & Michonne.
Source: Deadline
