Maggie and Negan Spinoff Is “The Walking Dead Like You’ve Never Seen It Before”

You’ve seen Maggie and Negan on The Walking Dead. You’ve seen The Walking Dead in the woods. But you’ve never quite seen The Walking Dead in an urban landscape like post-apocalyptic Manhattan. Zombie-infested New York City is the setting of The Walking Dead: Dead City — retitled from Isle of the Dead — the upcoming spin-off that sends Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) on a mission into the Big Apple to rescue Maggie’s kidnapped son Hershel Rhee (Logan Kim) from an enigmatic big bad known only as The Croat (Željko Ivanek). 

New York is “definitely a new character” in the show, series creator and showrunner Eli Jorné remarked during a WonderCon panel. “It’s The Walking Dead like you’ve never seen it before. We have been to Atlanta, but we haven’t really lived in a city like this.” 

AMC president Dan McDermott has described The Walking Dead Universe’s Manhattan as a decaying metropolis “where the bridges and tunnels were blown up at the onset of the [outbreak], because the walker herd had just overrun the island and it’s been left that way for 12 years. And so now it’s a 2 million walker-strong herd that is dominating the streets and making it treacherous and dangerous.”

Survivors trapped on the zombie-swarmed streets of the island traverse the city’s rooftops by zip-line, including the small civilian faction that still inhabits the 10th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. 

“I think for characters like Maggie and Negan who have been running through the woods for a long time, it’s a whole new world that’s extremely claustrophobic and scary,” Jorné continued, teasing the “little pockets of survivors” who live differently than the inhabitants of Alexandria, Hilltop, Oceanside, or the Commonwealth. “We get to see all the strange new ways that they’ve lived in the apocalypse, so it’s definitely like nothing you’ve seen before in any of the shows.”

Cohan and Morgan lead a cast that includes Ivanek (Damages) as The Croat, Gaius Charles (Grey’s Anatomy) as New Babylon lawman Perlie Armstrong, Mahina Napoleon (NCIS: Hawai’i) as Ginny, Jonathan Higginbotham (The Blacklist) as Tommaso, Trey Santiago-Hudson (New Amsterdam) as Jano, and Michael Anthony (The Game) as Luther.

AMC describes the Maggie and Negan spin-off: “Dead Cityfollows Maggie and Negan traveling into a post-apocalyptic Manhattanlong ago cut off from the mainland. The crumbling city is filled withthe dead and denizens who have made New York City their own world fullof anarchy, danger, beauty, and terror.”

The Walking Dead: Dead City premieres Sunday, June 18th, at 10 p.m. ET on AMC and AMC+ following Fear the Walking Dead. New episodes will air Sundays at 9 p.m.