The Walking Dead: Dead City (2023-?)

Horror/TV Show
Rated 18
Now TV
Spoilers for The Walking Dead

There’s been three new spin offs to the frustratingly good then bad then good again The Walking Dead (2010-2022). All three have only recently become available in the UK (legitimately). The zombie odyssey set mainly in the deep south of the USA following the apocalypse was hugely popular and although it did test my patience, it often rewarded it, and I very much count myself as a fan who was invested in the characters

Years ago (2009!) I started writing my own zombie fiction, and I thought it would be fun to do “research” for one section by locking myself in my house for a week and trying to live with no contact, TV or internet and whatnot only eating what’s in the fridge and cupboards. Just to see what the apocalypse might feel like. Obviously I’d have stocked up with a year’s worth of booze, just to be safe, but I didn’t end up doing it.

I broke my ankle recently and I’m weeks into a similar situation, housebound- though obviously with all creature comforts. Let me tell you, Uber Eats will be the first to go if the undead take over, and when TV falls (which I think I have completed now anyway), we’ll have to read books and eat cold beans. All I can say is I don’t recommend the apocalypse or to a lesser extent a broken ankle.

"Your pizza is running late."

If you want someone to start watching The Walking Dead, the spin offs massively ruin who lives to the end, which in my opinion is a bit of a spoiler and if you haven’t seen The Walking Dead, stop reading this NOW. I will admit that it’s impossible to market the three spin offs without telling you who’s in them.

My favourite of the three new shows is Dead City, where series favourites Negan (Jeffry Dean Morgan) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) are forced into a cooperative mission in a destroyed and overgrown New York City. Negan is probably my favourite character from The Walking Dead, who they didn’t kill off, with more shiftable morals than Sandor Clegane. And a million times the charisma.

Boasting stunning opening credits and an impressively rendered, decrepit NYC the aesthetic and narrative in parts remind me of Max Brooks’ seminal zombie novel (if there is such a thing!) World War Z. Digression, I enjoyed the film but the book offered so much more, though filming it as a documentary or something as I envisaged when reading would have been impossible, I admit.

15 years of seeing some admirably thought up at times, different types of “walkers” get their heads caved in did start to cause a thousand yard stare. The change in location is welcome and Dead City has one moment with an undead creation which was very effectively nasty, terrifying and creative.

The variation in venue works well in this spin off, as opposed to Daryl in France which is nonsense even for a zombie show: he meets only French people who speak English and how the hell he got there floating around listlessly in the first place might have been a better story. A José Salvador Alvarenga biopic with zombies? I’ll buy that for a dollar.

Sure all of these new offerings are a microcosm of every TWD series/season in that there’s a big baddy to defeat and a reason to gang up and do so, but frankly no fan who’s got this far was expecting much else. I hope. Dead City does all blur into one a bit, much like the main show did, but The Walking Dead has lived and died off its standout moments when it found them and Dead City is less decayed than it has any right to be.

Bedsit it?

Certainly the best of the spin offs, made most appealing by the New York location and Negan, even if you don’t like Dead City you’ll like its opening credits, but I very much enjoyed the show. 7/10

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