Negan and Maggie Take Manhattan in The Walking Dead: Dead City Teaser Trailer

By Cameron Bonomolo

"You don't trust me. Hell, I wouldn't trust me either," Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) tells his once enemy-turned-ally Maggie (Lauren Cohan) in The Walking Dead: Dead City teaser trailer. But trusting each other is what they'll have to do if Maggie hopes to save her son, Hershel Rhee (Logan Kim), from an enigmatic figure known only as The Croat (Željko Ivanek). Together, Maggie and Negan take Manhattan in the new Walking Dead spin-off series premiering June 18th on AMC and AMC+ following Fear the Walking Dead's mid-season finale. Watch the teaser trailer above.

Reunited years after The Walking Dead series finale, Maggie almost runs down Negan in her truck before they're at each other's throats — literally. "Good to see you, too," grins Negan, who reached an uneasy détente with Maggie and peacefully left Ohio's Commonwealth with his expecting wife Annie (Medina Senghore). 

New footage shows the truce is back on, with Maggie on a mission to zombie-infested New York City. "You want to tell me where the hell we're going?" asks Negan, who has young girl Ginny (Mahina Napoleon) in tow. "Manhattan," Maggie says. "I have a plan."

The official logline for the Maggie and Negan spin-off: "Dead City follows Maggie and Negan traveling 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 New York City their own world full of anarchy, danger, beauty, and terror."

"This is the next chapter in this story about Maggie and Negan. Another piece of it for me was what's at the core of Maggie and Negan's relationship — the grief, and loss, and trauma," series creator and showrunner Eli Jorné said during Dead City's WonderCon panel. "How do you navigate something like that? To me, that was always the center of the show. That's at the core here."

While the since-ended flagship series did an "amazing job" exploring the dysfunctional dynamic between Maggie and Negan, Jorné noted Dead City will "really zero in and peel away all these layers and go deeper and deeper and challenge the characters."

Dead City's New York setting is "The Walking Dead like you've never seen it before," added Jorné. "We have been to Atlanta [on The Walking Dead], but we haven't really lived in a city like this." The walker apocalypse's version of the Big Apple is one "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," according to AMC president Dan McDermott. "And so now it's a 2 million walker-strong herd that is dominating the streets and making it treacherous and dangerous."

Cohan and Morgan serve as executive producers and 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.

Related:

The Walking Dead: Dead City premieres June 18th on AMC and AMC+. 

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