“The goal of the show is to bring in all the people who love The Walking Dead and love these characters and feel deeply connected to that universe, but also anybody can jump into this show,” The Walking Dead: Dead City showrunner Eli Jorné revealed during a TCA press conference for the new series, which premieres tonight at 10/9c on AMC and AMC+. “You do not need to have watched The Walking Dead before. You’ll get to know these characters and their history very quickly, and I don’t think that you need to bring eleven to twelve years of viewership to the show to connect to it, to feel it, to enjoy it.”
(AMC/Christine Ramage)
Dead City follows fan-favorite characters Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) as they fight through New York City on a quest to rescue Maggie’s kidnapped son. “The Walking Dead was an ensemble show, franchise chief content officer Scott M. Gimple said of one of the biggest tonal changes in Dead City. “This show is very focused on Maggie and Negan, and then the few other characters that we're bringing in. There aren't a ton of other characters, and we get to tell their stories deeply. And then, beyond that, we're in New York City. And what happened to New York is not what happened to Georgia and Virginia. It is a different civilization. The tone of the story is a little different. The visuals are different… The Walking Dead started with a fusion of classic stuff like John Ford and then Romero infused those together. These are more, I don't wanna say contemporary horror references, but a little further down the line, like John Carpenter, like Escape from New York.”
“We have this intensely personal story with Dead City in a moment of such desperation that I’m even soliciting my known enemy to help me with it,” Lauren Cohan said of where we find her character Maggie. Lauren also serves as an executive producer on the series. “The responsibility with this new show has been to honor everything that works with The Walking Dead and that the fans want, and that we want to share, and how we want to tell the story, and then to give ourselves something uncomfortable and surprising. Coming from this world of The Walking Dead and being somebody who pays attention to such little things for so long, and then having this opportunity to give it back and pour it back into the work, not just as an actor, but just in ideas for everything that we’re doing, in terms of just how we promote the show, and how we work on the show, and how we develop our next season for the show, and all this stuff has just been so rewarding. It’s just this extra level of investment. Scott came to us and told us that Eli had come up with this idea for the story, and there had been many iterations about how these spinoffs would work, and when we landed on this one and knew where it was going to go, it just felt like untapped potential. That is a big part of what happens in The Walking Dead is that this sort of roving spotlight with so many series regulars keeps it really interesting, and it serves a lot of interesting storylines.”
“The great thing about Negan in this role is how much he’s changed from that day that he walked out of the RV,” Jeffrey Dean Morgan said of his character. “[The writers] have really fleshed out a character that lived beyond the comic books. And that was a tricky thing to do with Negan. We only really see one side of him with what Kirkman has done.” Now an executive producer, Jeffrey is eager to show fans more of Negan’s development and hopes it will top the flack he occasionally receives for his character’s introduction, which resulted in the death of another beloved character. “The journey that Negan’s been on and where he finds himself now in Dead City is a faraway place from where we first met him… In the last scene that we saw him in The Walking Dead, him not talking for the first time in his life and hearing why [Maggie] can’t forgive him, to now her obviously needing something from Negan… It’s just been a full circle, is what I can really say.”
In an effort to avoid major spoilers, the cast and creative team were tight-lipped about details of the new series. But we did get some information about Perlie Armstrong, a new character played by Gaius Charles. “I’m a marshal in the show,” Gaius shared. “We really haven’t seen the presentation of marshals and police and law enforcement, and we get to see that in this, and I come out of that world in that space where I cling to law and order as a way to make sense of this apocalypse that we’re living in. What’s interesting to me is how everybody has their own way of dealing with the new normal. And my new normal is this kind of law-and-order piece.” Perlie Armstrong becomes a new obstacle for Negan, but behind the scenes, Gaius and Jeffrey get along swimmingly. And proving Eli Jorné’s point, Gaius had not seen much of The Walking Dead before landing the role and he had no difficulty getting into the series, using Dead City as a jumping-off point.
“We want to honor the fans that have been there for years, but we don’t want to keep anybody out and, certainly, you can start any of these shows, and if you know the history, it’s a rich experience, if you don’t know the history you’ll find out those references to it,” Scott Gimple said of the way Dead City both reaches out to longtime fans of The Walking Dead while also serving as a perfect entry point for someone who’s never seen the original series. “There’s characters on the show that have shown up deep into their apocalypse identity, whether it was Negan when he showed up or Alpha or some of the other survivors. We didn’t tell their pasts and they were compelling, and then we got into their past because they were interesting, but that was years down the line. That’s what we want to do with these new shows. If people stumbled onto these iconic characters, they would find them iconic without knowing the last thirteen years of their lives.”
The Walking Dead: Dead City premieres tonight at 10/9c on AMC and AMC+.