‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Showrunner Promises That The Spinoff Will Do What The Original Series Never Had Time To Do

Sure, the TV world is all a-flutter about Succession right now, but The Walking Dead universe is still cooking up its followups to the flagship series’ 2022 conclusion.

Following the eighth and final season of Fear The Walking Dead (which is making noises about Rick Grimes during promotional material), we’ll get to see the first of a new batch of spinoffs. That leader shall be The Walking Dead: Dead City, which will bring us the unlikely dream team of Maggie and Negan, who will traipse through an unsleeping city (in search of Hershel Rhees, son of Maggie and the late Glenn) where the dead don’t die in even larger numbers.

Showrunner Eli Jorne has already shared that the skyscraper-bound series will include “one of the most awesome, disgusting, terrifying walkers that I’ve seen in the history of the show,” and he recently opened up more about how this series will zero in on “the grief, and loss, and trauma” of what Negan put Maggie through, but also, this spinoff should deliver character depth that the original series never could do, since it was so busy squeezing in a burgeoning new world of characters. Via Comic Book, Jorne promised (during WonderCon) that more layers will soon unfurl:

While The Walking Dead “did such an amazing job” exploring the Maggie and Negan dynamic, the flagship had to service another dozen-plus characters. In the more intimate Dead City, “We get to really zero in and peel away all these layers and go deeper and deeper and challenge the characters [of Maggie and Negan].”

Said Cohan, “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 show’s synopsis reveals how the island of Manhattan has been “long ago cut off from the mainland” when Dead City picks up. Further, one should expect amplified “anarchy, danger, beauty, and terror.” That will included walkers falling from skyscrapers, which certainly suggests another shift in gears for this franchise.

The Walking Dead: Dead City premieres on June 18.