The Walking Dead spin-off proves there’s life in those tired legs yet

The Walking Dead: Dead City, Stan*
★★★½

I’m not sure if this says more about me or The Walking Dead, but as I watched Maggie (Lauren Cohan) do battle with a slime-covered multi-headed zombie in the sewers beneath Manhattan I chewed away happily on my lunch rather than worrying that I might cough it up.

Lauren Cohan as Maggie Rhee in The Walking Dead: Dead City. Credit: Peter Kramer/AMC

It’s not that the long-running franchise has completely lost the ability to churn stomachs. It’s just that the world in which its storylines operate has become so familiar to those of us who have been with it since the beginning that it rarely shocks.

Besides, it has long been established that the greatest threat in this post-apocalyptic universe is not the undead but the living who have survived largely by abandoning any semblance of human decency. A mere zombie isn’t going to ruin anyone’s lunch any more.

Dead City is a self-contained six-part spin-off from the main event, which wrapped last year after 11 seasons and 177 episodes. It is the fifth iteration of the outrageously productive franchise, with two more standalone series – Daryl Dixon and Rick & Michonne – set to drop soon, and yet another, More Tales of The Walking Dead, in the works.

In short, The Walking Dead is the franchise that refuses to die.

This spin-off is the first featuring the main cast, and it shifts the action from the backwoods of Georgia to the ruined city of New York – specifically Manhattan, which is now cut off from the other four boroughs.

Run, don’t walk: Mahina Napoleon as Ginny and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Negan.Credit: Stan

Maggie’s son Hershel has been kidnapped by a group led by a crazed psychopath known as The Croat (Zeljko Ivanek, a familiarly villainous face from countless American shows, though the Slovenian-born actor is perhaps best known for his turn as Ray Fiske in the legal drama Damages). She corrals Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) – long-time nemesis, sometime compadre, and never-to-be-forgiven murderer of her husband, and Hershel’s dad, Glenn – into helping rescue the lad.

The change of location works well; not since the very first season of TWD, in which much of the action took place in the deserted streets of Atlanta, has the urban environment figured much. Coincidentally or not, The Last of Us – a show that was clearly inspired by TWD, but which has raised the genre stakes considerably – spent much of its time in a trashed Boston.

New York and Georgia are more than 1200 kilometres apart, a fair old distance for those scraping by with limited fuel and no telecommunications, yet everyone here seems to know everyone else.

The Croat used to be one of Negan’s henchmen when the latter was the sadistic ruler of the settlement known as The Sanctuary. Sheriff Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles) is on a mission to bring Negan to whatever passes as justice in this lawless world. Ginny (Mahina Napoleon) is a teen runaway whom Negan has taken under his wing, for reasons that only slowly become apparent.

There’s new sheriff in town: Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles) is on a mission to bring Negan to justice.Credit: Stan

For the first couple of episodes I wondered if I had any appetite for more of this (the undead have become so passe). But by the end, Dead City had won me over. The six-episode arc is long enough to tease out complex motives, short enough to avoid bogging down in the endless biting and grasping of the easily dispensed-with walkers.

In short, this spin-off breathes a welcome sense of peril back into the universe. But with so many more spin-offs to come, the real trick will be if the producers can avoid choking the franchise to death.

*Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.

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