Maggie and Negan Spinoff: The Walking Dead Fans React to Isle of the Dead

"What the f***?" So say The Walking Dead fans about Isle of the Dead, a spinoff following Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and nemesis Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to post-apocalyptic Manhattan. AMC Networks has greenlit the spinoff from TWD Universe chief content officer Scott Gimple and executive producer Eli Jorné (Season 10 of The Walking Dead), who will showrun the series set in a zombie-overrun New York City. Isle of the Dead is the fifth television spinoff of the flagship AMC zombie drama and is set to premiere in 2023, the same year Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride ride off on their own adventure in the untitled Daryl & Carol series.

"Isle of the Dead envisions the popular Maggie and Negan characters traveling into a post-apocalyptic Manhattan long ago cut off from the mainland," reads the synopsis revealed by AMC. "The crumbling city is filled with the dead and denizens who have made New York City their own world full of anarchy, danger, beauty, and terror."

Negan widowed the then-pregnant Maggie when the then-Savior leader turned "vampire bat" Lucille on her husband, Glenn (Steven Yeun), in the Season 7 premiere of The Walking Dead. Nearly a decade later in-universe, Maggie and Negan are forced to work together to save a starving Alexandria in Season 11. Negan parted ways with Maggie and went into self-exile in "No Other Way," but Negan will return with a new group in March 20 episode "Warlords." 

The six-episode first season of Isle of the Dead will take Maggie and Negan "to their limits with the world — and each other," teased Gimple, who executive produces with Cohan and Morgan.

Jorné has "created a chaotic, beautiful, grimy madhouse of the dead for Negan, Maggie, and fans of the show eager to discover an unseen and insane world of the TWD Universe," Gimple said via AMC. "Lauren and Jeffrey have always been fantastic collaborators and now, we bring that collaboration to the next level with a series that will take these characters to their limits with the world — and each other. All of us are thrilled to take you on an all new, all different TWD epic for the ages." 

"Did we forget how Negan brutally murdered Maggie's husband with a bat?" one fan tweeted in response to the news. Reads another tweet reacting to the spinoff, "If this isn't a Negan vs. Maggie plot, I'm not sure I will be able to buy into this." 

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