Though 2023 kicked off as the first year in over a decade without a new season of The Walking Dead universe’s flagship series on the horizon, a host of news has already been revealed for the rest of the franchise’s upcoming TV projects. For one, we know that the long-running spinoff Fear the Walking Dead will follow up on that Season 7 shocker by ending with its upcoming, time-jumping eighth season. Plus, we know for sure that the highly anticipated Rick and Michonne limited series won’t be around until 2024. Thankfully, this week also brought some new details and imagery from The Walking Dead: Dead City, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan’s next chapter as Negan and Maggie. And one of those new pics features a specific location that I’ve long wanted to see in this world: a bar.
AMC put out several new peeks at the upcoming spinoff, which will have Maggie and Negan traveling into the heart of New York City, in part to track a dangerous killer. That kind of life can certainly make one want to take a load off by sitting back and cracking open a cold one, or perhaps nursing a bottle of wine or whiskey. It appears just such an experience can be had for Dead City’s characters, as evidenced by the shot below.
Is it just me, or does this look like it’s coming out of a completely different franchise? That kind of purple and green lighting is just completely foreign to the general Walking Dead aesthetic, and I kind of love it. Especially with Maggie’s leathery clothing choices. I do wonder what kind of booze she’d opt for, and certainly hope we’ll find out. If anybody deserves to get slap-faced shithoused in this post-apocalypse, it’s the woman who has to team up with the behemoth that murdered her husband.
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Just in case anyone thought I was making assumptions about the setting based loosely on what’s seen, Maggie is opposite actor Charlie Solis, who is credited with playing the character “Bartender,” so unless that’s a pretty particular surname, this is a bar. (I hope to hell that Mo Collins’ Sarah finds out about this place before it’s all over with, and that Mr. Bartender has some quality suds on tap.)
To bring things back around to the hubby-killing Negan, another one of the new images has him held at knifepoint, and seemingly ready to have it all come to an end, even though we know that's not happening.
Several of the new shots are similar to the one seen below, with the main characters out and about in the city streets, with that weird greenish night glow happening. As if things were being viewed through a Heineken bottle or something. The third actor shown below is Trey Santiago-Hudson, who'll star as Jano.
Let's cap things off with another new character, the grim-faced Armstrong, as portrayed by Grey's Anatomy vet Gaius Charles. He looks like he could smell Negan's bullshit from halfway across the country, and I'm hoping one of the first things his character does is explain how he keeps his hat looking so fresh and so clean.
With The Walking Dead's final season now available to stream with a Netflix subscription, the spinoff Dead City is set to debut on AMC in June, with an exact premiere date yet to be revealed. In the meantime, head to our 2023 TV premiere schedule to see what other new and returning shows are on the way.
