‘The Walking Dead: Dead City’ Review: AMC’s Spinoff Is Only for the True Undead Faithful

As I continue to decompress after the recent onslaught of finales, it remains perplexing how quiet last fall’s conclusion to The Walking Dead was. Sure, the show was no longer a critical favorite or an audience juggernaut, but The Walking Dead spent years as one of the most discussed shows on all of television, only to lurch haltingly into the sunset.

Or maybe there was an instinct to devalue the ostensible series finale of The Walking Dead because AMC had already announced a bevy of upcoming spinoffs. What was the point in getting worked up about missing our favorite remaining grungy survivalists and the zombies who loved to eat them when we knew nobody was going to be gone for long?

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The first of the spinoffs from the Walking Dead mothership, not to be confused with Fear the Walking Dead or several unrelated spinoffs remembered only by TV critics and franchise obsessives, is The Walking Dead: Dead City. Without the semi-redundant subtitle, Dead City could basically be the start of season 12 of The Walking Dead, and it takes until the fifth and sixth episodes for anything even slightly distinctive to emerge. So take that as you will. If you happen to be really tired of the core Walking Dead formula, it’s a long time before you’ll get even a hint of creative rejuvenation — and it really is only a hint, so don’t get your hopes up. If, however, you’re perfectly content to have Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan back on your TV making zombies go squish … The Walking Dead: Dead City delivers a barely adulterated version of that formula. Either way, it’s hard to get excited.

Set in an irrelevant period of time after the end of the original series, Dead City begins with Maggie (Cohan) in a bad emotional place. Her son Hershel (Logan Kim) has been abducted by a terrifying settlement leader known as The Croat (Željko Ivanek) and taken to the isolated remains of New York City. The only person capable of helping Maggie apparently is Negan (Morgan), formerly The Croat’s pal and mentor in psychopathy. Sure, Negan bludgeoned Maggie’s husband with a baseball bat in front of her eyes, but postapocalyptic times make for strange bedfellows. Plus, Negan is now traveling with a silent teenage girl (Mahina Napoleon’s Ginny), so maybe he’s mellowed?

Spoiler: Negan hasn’t mellowed. He’s actually wanted for a quintet of murders and pursued by Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles), a marshal from New Babylon, a more peaceful settlement with strict notions of law and order.

Soon, Maggie and Negan are making their way to New York City in search of The Croat and Armstrong is on his way to Manhattan in search of Negan. New York City is swarming with zombies, but — and this is another huge spoiler — Maggie, Negan and Armstrong are about to learn that, however scary the zombies are, it’s man’s inhumanity to man that’s the real killer.

Cue Walking Dead fans gasping in surprise.

Those sarcastic gasps of surprise are in response to the only meaningful twists through maybe two-thirds of the season. Creator Eli Jorné is a veteran of the original series, and he knows the show’s rhythms. Our plucky heroes find themselves in different enclaves of survivors, are reminded that no two makeshift societies are exactly identical; they fall into two categories — fundamentally well-meaning and therefore on the verge of decimation or under the thumb of an autocratic ruler and therefore thriving in a sadistic way that’s on the verge of moral ruin.

I’d warn viewers not to get too invested in any of the new characters, except the show’s audience already knows that. Fortunately, there is absolutely no chance of investing in any of the new characters. Armstrong, whose fancy, wide-brimmed hat and snazzy black duster coat let you know that he’s supposed to be something of an Old West-style archetype, is the closest to a fully developed character — or maybe Charles just cuts a strong presence, or maybe I just like Smash Williams from Friday Night Lights.

Along the same lines, I can’t say for sure if I’m just happy to have Ivanek back to playing weirdos after his lengthy paycheck gig on Madam Secretary or if he’s actually good here. My instinct is that The Croat is not nuanced enough for Ivanek to be doing anything other than adding quirky dimension to what is basically the show’s latest Negan/Governor figure. Yes, he likes to torture people, but he can also be disarmingly friendly and who among us can’t relate? That his position is a hair more complicated than that is completely irrelevant, since that’s all he presents as for four episodes.

The show’s biggest character-based problem is one that has carried over from the original series. People on The Walking Dead love to monologue, to tell the heartbreaking story of how they lost their wife/child/heart-in-San-Francisco. But every monologue in the show is written in the same voice and delivered in the same halting whisper, so when you finish watching a character opine about their personal tragedy for a minute or two, the only thing you’re left knowing is that they lost someone, which is somehow less than illuminating in a show in which everybody has lost many somebodys.

Every once in a while, there’s something poignant in one of these monologues, but they’re so generally interchangeable that I’ll confess I missed a semi-major piece of information in Dead City because after the third or fourth monologue of the same sort in a single episode, I tuned out. There are characters whom Dead City presents as possible regulars who don’t last long and none of their deaths make any impact — which definitely was not the case in the early peak seasons of The Walking Dead.

The big evolution in Dead City was supposed to be its fresh location and use of urban space, the latter requiring that you forget that seasons one and two of Walking Dead used Atlanta-in-ruins very well. This new show was shot vaguely on location, but so much of the dystopifying of New York City has to have been done digitally that the authenticity is buried under either computer pixels or production design. Settings alternate between over-augmented versions of recognizable Big Apple landmarks, and abandoned alleyways and dark tunnels that could be any city (or soundstage). Throw in how inexplicably uninspired the walkers themselves are — despite the usual participation from Greg Nicotero’s team — and it’s hard to find anything scary.

There is, though, a shift in the fifth and sixth episodes. It isn’t instantly clear what to attribute that shift to, though I guess I’ll credit the arrival of director Gandja Monteiro (Brand New Cherry Flavor). Suddenly, the obligatory ambulating through zombie-filled subway or sewer tunnels takes on a hallucinatory edge. The overall storytelling becomes fragmented in a more challenging way and opens things up for a minor surprise or two. There’s at least one walker variation that I’m pretty sure I didn’t recognize from previous adventures and, as a result, it freaked me out. And the sixth episode, the last of this very micro season, pivots the show someplace new-ish, concluding with a last shot that is effective and chilling.

Up until that point? The Walking Dead: Dead City is carried along by Cohan’s feral intensity (and the inconsistency of her Southern accent) and Morgan’s only somewhat tempered mania, as the show too often hopes you’ll forget what he did to Glenn and just find Negan to be a rascally, homicidal scamp. If that’s enough for you initially, know that there’s improvement by the end of the season. If it’s not, AMC probably wasn’t luring you back to The Walking Dead anyway.