Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ On AMC, Where Maggie Recruits Negan To Help Rescue Her Son From A Burned-Out Manhattan

Now that the original series The Walking Dead has shuffled off to join the undead after 11 seasons, the franchise can now concentrate on spinoffs that feature the characters from that series, instead of new characters from other places and times during the zombie apocalypse. The first of these stars two fan favorites: Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

THE WALKING DEAD: DEAD CITY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A view of midtown and lower Manhattan, burned-out and broken down. Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan) views it from across the Hudson River through a scope.

The Gist: As she scouts the location, Maggie sees the line of thousands of walkers rambling down the West Side Highway. She almost gets caught by a walker, but caves in its skull with the scope and lets out a primal scream.

The next time we see Maggie is at a bar and motel; she pretends to get drunk, but she’s looking for someone to help her with walkers. She’s actually looking for Negan Smith (Jeffrey Dean Morgan); she’s gotten a lead that this is where he’s been hiding out. She gets grabbed by some enforcers but fights her way out, utilizing the skills she’s built up over the years and the knife she’s built into one of her boots.

She finds Negan, traveling with a girl named Ginny (Mahina Napoleon), and corners them with her truck. She shows him the wanted poster the marshals of a place called New Babylon have been distributing, which is how she tracked him down. As distasteful the idea of working with the man who killed her husband Glenn (Steven Yeun) is to Maggie, she needs him to help rescue her teenage son Hershel (Logan Kim) from a former member of The Saviors called “The Croat” (Zeljko Ivanek), who kidnapped him when his gang invaded and robbed the Hilltop community she was the leader of.

Of course he’s reluctant, but she vows to turn him in if he doesn’t cooperate. After dropping Ginny off with Nina (Pallavi Sastry) at the Hilltop’s new location. Since New York City was one of the centers of the initial outbreak over a dozen years prior, the U.S. government blew up the bridges and tunnels to try to isolate the walkers, to no avail. But this means that Negan and Maggie have to row across the river. Maggie has sensed a pattern with one building where smoke goes up at certain times of the day. She wants them to row over in the dead of night.

In the meantime, a marshal named Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles) is looking for Negan, for the crimes he’s committed in New Babylon. He goes to the motel here he was hiding and tells the gang there about his history, including the time he based in Glenn’s skull in front of a pregnant Maggie. In other words, he’s an evil man they shouldn’t be protecting.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Walking Dead: Dead City is the first direct sequel to The Walking Dead instead of a series taking place somewhere else in the show’s universe.

Our Take: Because Dead City, whose showrunner is TWD veteran Eli Jorné, is a direct sequel, it’s certainly hard for people to drop into the show without having some knowledge of what went on before. Heck, even if you were TWD watchers that quit the series before it ended, you’ll likely be somewhat confused by things. What is New Babylon? Since when has Negan been remorseful about being the ruthless head of the Saviors? What is Hilltop? And how did Hershel become a teenager?

Here’s how: The original series went through a bunch of time jumps in its latter seasons, and this show is supposed to take place about two years after the events of the series finale. But the first episode of Dead City doesn’t suffer because of that; it suffers because there’s a ton of exposition that catches Maggie and Negan up with each other, and it feels like the two of them are relitigating the traumatic events they were both a part of, with Maggie once again telling Negan why she doesn’t trust him and Negan once again talking about being a new man, but also telling Maggie that even she’s probably killed someone’s husband or father at some point.

Of course, the show isn’t about the walkers; it never has been. But in Dead City, the walkers seem to be even more of an afterthought, even as we see them being the cause of the demise of more than one person in this first episode. At this point in the show’s timeline, they’re a danger that needs to be respected but can certainly be worked around, especially for survivors like Maggie, who has trained herself on how to fight them as well as the live humans who are even more dangerous.

The only real variable that we see here is that the apocalyptic landscape isn’t a suburb or rural setting but The Big Apple itself. It’s not the first time we’ve seen how the zombie apocalypse affects an urban area; the franchise started in Atlanta, after all. But it was still creepy to see abandoned streetscapes riddled with garbage and bodies. And it feels like it’ll be fun to see Ivanek, always creepy as hell, operating in this world as The Croat. But, there’s not much here for viewers other than TWD diehards to latch onto.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: The Croat casually kills an escaped prisoner by cutting the wire the man is trying to use as a zipline.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the visual effects team for being able to show what the Manhattan skyline might look like over a decade after a zombie apocalypse.

Most Pilot-y Line: When the boat Negan, Maggie, and a young marshal they’ve captured comes closer to lower Manhattan, Negan exclaims, “Fuuuck me!” We rewound that three times to figure out if he saw something, but we think he was just reacting to the sight of New York’s huge buildings in a shambles.

Our Call: STREAM IT, if you’re a Walking Dead completist. But, for everyone else, SKIP IT. The Walking Dead: Dead City feels like the same show whose storytelling ambles like a hungry walker at times, just in a new location.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.