Your first visit to New York City is a little bit of magic. It’s overwhelming, big, bright… There are so many different places to take in and things to do. Your second visit? Well, maybe you start to notice the stink a little bit. The sidewalks, packed with tourists (even if you’re one yourself) are starting to grate. Sure, there are still things to do — nobody can take in all those Broadway shows and museums in one trip — but perhaps that initial magic has gone. That’s sort of the feeling you get from Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) in The Walking Dead: Dead City, which returns for Season 2 on May 4: they don’t want to be in NYC anymore, and are starting to feel like Manhattan isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Created by Eli Jorné, Dead City found Maggie escaping New York with her son Hershel (Logan Kim) at the end of Season 1, with Negan trapped in it, held prisoner by the villainous The Dama (Lisa Emery) and her second-in-command, a former acolyte of Negan’s called The Croat (Željko Ivanek). The essential issue with Season 2 is that, in the six episodes out of eight provided for critics, both Maggie and Negan want to get out of the city. Maggie is drawn back by forces out of her control, with her main goal to leave as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, Negan is forced to stay thanks to The Dama’s manipulations, but would leave in a second if he could.
It’s simply not as much fun watching two characters who want to exit the scenario they’re in, versus the desperate siege on the mysterious, broken city to rescue Hershel from Season 1. Maggie was there because she wanted her son back. Negan was there, despite Maggie hating him more than anyone in the world, because he was the only person who could help her. In Season 2, Dead City needs to keep finding excuses for them to stay.
There’s another issue inherent in Season 2: Dead City keeps Negan and Maggie separated for most of the length of the episodes. That works when you have characters like Carol (Melissa McBride) and Daryl (Norman Reedus), or Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira), who desperately want to reunite with each other; you can feel that pull between the characters even when they’re not on screen together. With Maggie and Negan, shippers be damned, they hate each other’s guts. At best, they begrudgingly respect each other’s skills, but have yet to come around to liking each other. Maggie will never forget that Negan murdered her husband, Glenn (Steven Yeun); and Negan will never stop regretting being the man he was when he did that. That tension only works when the two are together, not when they are relieved they don’t have to see each other’s faces.
Mind you, the show does play with that idea a bit in Season 2, and even begins to broach the subject that, Glenn aside, they may actually like each other, and want to be together. If that’s the eventual conclusion in the two episodes not screened? It may have made the point better if the duo were in each other’s presence more, a la Season 1.
Instead, Negan spends most of the season doing his best impression of the “lord forgive me but it’s time to go back to the old me” meme as he’s coerced into picking up his barbed-wire bat and putting on his leather jacket again. Morgan adopts a more world-weary take on the iconic villain, versus how we first met him years ago on The Walking Dead, mixed with a glimmer of excitement at being allowed to cut loose. It’s an interesting idea that Morgan puts all his acting chops into, but might have worked better if the folks running New York weren’t such a sad assembly of villains. Without spoiling too much, the weird idea Dead City has is that the theater kids and artsie-fartsies are the most powerful people in New York City. Maybe that’s true of culture and newspapers, but it’s hard not to think that these baddies who are ruling the gangs of New York would be dead in a second in real life. A post-apocalypse New York would more likely be ruled by the NYPD, if anything; not theater critics and patrons of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
While Morgan gets a lot to bite into, that leaves a lot less for Cohan. Mostly, Maggie is once again worried about Hershel, who was revealed to have been under the sway of The Dama after the villain held him hostage in Season 1. Cohan is a talented performer — and as seen in the fourth and sixth episodes, an able director, as well. But most of what Maggie is doing this season is wringing her hands over Hershel while other characters talk about how she’s the most capable and strategic warrior they’ve got. Past an action scene in the first episode, Cohan moves to the back — perhaps to give her space to prep for directing — and it’s a net loss for the show. And given that Kim still doesn’t make enough of an impression as the moody teen Hershel, giving all her focus in his direction isn’t nearly as interesting as whatever should be going on with the two main characters.
There are literal glimmers of good ideas throughout here. As we discovered in Season 1, The Dama and The Croat are working to bring power back to New York with methane powered by walker corpses. That’s gross and interesting, and leads to the intriguing visual of Radio City Music Hall lit up in the post-apocalyptic landscape of Manhattan. We also meet new factions, from some cult-like Central Park dwellers to elites living in the Met. It’s all highly influenced by The Warriors — and that and Escape from New York, the two direct antecedents of this show, are solid material to work from. But Dead City squanders a lot of that given there’s nobody really to root for… All of these groups, including the loose confederation Maggie is part of, suck. There’s no central group that’s worth following, like there has been on previous Walking Dead series (or the us against the world mentality of The Ones Who Live), or even Dead City Season 1. Instead, the groups in the city suck, the groups outside the city suck, and Maggie and Negan, by extension… Well, they don’t suck, but they’re definitely stuck. To relate it to past Walking Dead storylines, it’s like if the folks from Terminus ended up duking it out with The Whisperers. It’s a losing proposition, because they all should probably die. There’s nobody to identify with.
And because of that, the season ends up mired in a lot of the criticisms that have been thrown at the franchise for nearly its entire run. There’s a lot of talk about who we are and who we can become. People head to a destination, get attacked by the undead, and run to the next destination. People are mean and bad to each other, and horrible deaths happen with some regularity. But whereas Daryl Dixon has shaken up the formula with some gorgeous terrain in Europe, The Ones Who Live had the epic romance of Michonne and Rick, and even the first few episodes of Dead City ably played with the New York setting, like having stockbroker zombies falling from the sky on Wall Street, Dead City Season 2 starts to feel like more of the same. It’s unfortunate, because Negan and Maggie deserve better — and perhaps would have gotten more if the show had focused on leaving it all on the table in Season 1.
As is, Dead City Season 2 is that great restaurant you told all of your friends about in Midtown Manhattan that, on second visit, turns out to have been a tourist trap the whole time. There are better options anywhere else — Downtown, Brooklyn, even a few blocks to the West. But if you don’t travel there, you’ll never know. Perhaps Dead City will go there in the final two episodes. Right now, though? It’s the Sbarro’s on 42nd Street.
The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 premieres Sunday, May 4 at 9pm ET on AMC and AMC+.
The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
New episodes of The Walking Dead: Dead City premiere on Sundays on AMC and AMC+. The episodes premiere at 9 pm ET on AMC and AMC+
Here’s the full list of episodes in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 2 with premiere dates:
- Sunday, May 4, 2024: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 2, Episode 1
- Sunday, May 11, 2024: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 2, Episode 2
- Sunday, May 18, 2024: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 2, Episode 3
- Sunday, May 25, 2024: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 2, Episode 4
- Sunday, June 1, 2024: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 2, Episode 5
- Sunday, June 8, 2024: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 2, Episode 6
- Sunday, June 15, 2024: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 2, Episode 7
- Sunday, June 22, 2024: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 2, Episode 8 *season finale*
Where To Watch The Walking Dead: Dead City
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