It’s tough not to feel like we’re hitting the end of the line with AMC’s now nearly 16-year-old The Walking Dead franchise. The fourth and final season of Daryl Dixon will premiere later this year, and after a meandering, exceedingly grim and often confusing second season, Dead City is coming back for Season 3 with a new showrunner and no announced fourth season (as of this writing). But if TWD is ending after all these years, it’s a bit of a shame because – shocker of shockers – The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 is a gleefully fun season of television that shows there are actually new ways of injecting life into the zombie series.
Mind you, it’s not all smooth sailing. Incoming showrunner Seth Hoffman spends most of the first hour of the season (all eight episodes were provided for critics) wiping away the detritus of the previous, muddled seasons of the series with an episode that almost literally finds main characters Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) stuck in a hole. And the final pair of episodes slide back into sort of where you expect them to go after hundreds of The Walking Dead episodes, with your requisite battles for the future of society boiling down to a bit of the old ultra-violence.
But in between? Hoffman and company deliver a shocking blast of innovation to the story of the weird friendship between mother Maggie and the man who killed her husband. Part of that is mostly ignoring/not worrying too much about what came before in the previous two seasons, though that means a little less focus on the Battle for Manhattan plot and more on establishing a vibe that is basically a combo of The Pitt, Cheers, and Friends, but with zombies.
And it works? Morgan and Cohan seem to be having a blast. There are multiple times where characters remark they haven’t seen Maggie smile like this – ever. Cohan is an eminently charming actor who mostly has been depicted as sobbing and depressed, jaw clenched since Maggie’s hubbie Glenn (Steven Yuen) was killed — by Negan — back in 2016. To see her play something different, to actually be happy and enjoy what she’s doing, while wondering if it’s okay to be happy at all, whether that in some way diminishes her memory of Glenn… That’s a much more interesting mode than the umpteenth discussion about how hard the world has become.
That’s assisted by the addition of two characters who help Maggie get her groove back, while providing powerful presences of their own: Aimee Garcia as Renata, a plucky leader of a local group who provides the hopeful, earnest foil to Maggie’s more suspicious nature; and Renata’s brother Luis (Raul Castillo), a hunky doctor who might shake Maggie out of another part of her funk.
Similarly, while not letting go of any of the damage Negan has caused over the past decade, Morgan gets to break out of his own familiar patterns by making a new friend in local bar owner/weirdo Dillard (Jimmi Simpson). Simpson is an expert at this sort of thing, and seeing him hang out in a bar partying with defanged walkers feels like a lost plotline from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where he played one of the bizarrely wet McPoyle brothers. But he also is a great foil to Morgan, with the duo quickly settling into being the goofy pranksters at the bar next door, popping in to Maggie’s more serious adventures whenever they’re needed.
There’s also structural experimentation going on this season, from an episode that does play almost straight up like The Pitt (or really, any hospital drama in pseudo-real time), to a fun trip out of town for Maggie and Luis that shows them how life could break out of the patterns established since the dawn of the zombie apocalypse, to one of the wildest episodes in Walking Dead history which I won’t spoil here. Suffice to say that hour, which comes late in the season, will either be seen as a bold experiment; or the true Jump The Shark moment for The Walking Dead franchise. I personally fall on the former, and laud Hoffman and company for taking a bonkers swing like this (I realize I’m being cagey here), particularly if TWD is winding down. But it won’t be for everyone.
Don’t worry, there is still plenty of angst about the future of the world, and plenty of big, wild action scenes that have made TWD the sensation it is; some gruesomely violent moments and plenty of Walker innovation from Greg Nicotero’s crack crew of FX artists. But what really characterizes the season is Hoffman’s fresh eyes coming in and looking at Maggie and Negan after years away (Hoffman previously worked on the fourth, fifth, and sixth season of TWD) and thinking: what can we do better? How can we use excellent actors like Morgan and Cohan, refocusing on them and the relationship between Negan and Maggie?
And it is some complex, hard work that Morgan and Cohan put in here, some of the best acting we’ve seen from them on these shows in a very, very long time. In particular, the show settles down enough to have two paired scenes in different episodes where it’s just Maggie and Negan having drinks which is some of the most complicated, powerfully emotional work they’ve done — ever. It’s also, laudably, not about what some fans have feared: a romantic relationship. It’s decidedly not that, though Cohan and Morgan have plenty of chemistry on screen. Instead, it’s seeing these two grow to begrudgingly respect and need each other, even going as far as to form a friendship, while the initial pain of their first meeting where one bashed the other’s husband’s head in with a baseball bat will never go away. It digs into the idea that we are a sum of all our experiences, good, bad, and objectively terrible, while allowing that people can grow and change, and forgiveness both for others and one’s self is not a done-in-one process.
…Did I mention it’s also a lot of fun? There’s a lightness here that was missing from the show for the past season and a half (the first few episodes of the first season played like a wild riff on Escape From New York before the action ground to a halt) that makes it one of the most engrossing seasons of TWD from the past few years. And if this is a send-off for Maggie and Negan, at least it ends on a high note. But with Morgan and Cohan feeling like they’re just getting started this season, fingers crossed Dead City comes back to life… At least for a few more episodes.
The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
New episodes of The Walking Dead: Dead City premiere on Sundays on AMC and AMC+, starting July 26, 2026. The episodes premiere at 9 pm ET on AMC and 9 pm ET / 6 pm PT on AMC+.
Here’s the full list of episodes in The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 with expected premiere dates:
- Sunday, July 26, 2026: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 3, Episode 1, “Trillium”
- Sunday, August 2, 2026: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 3, Episode 2, “Haven”
- Sunday, August 9, 2026: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 3, Episode 3, “Emigrants”
- Sunday, August 16, 2026: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 3, Episode 4, “Found/Lost”
- Sunday, August 23, 2026: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 3, Episode 5, “Imperialis”
- Sunday, August 30, 2026: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 3, Episode 6, “Genesis”
- Sunday, September 6, 2026: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 3, Episode 7, “Hourglass”
- Sunday, September 13, 2026: The Walking Dead: Dead City, Season 3, Episode 8, “Tenebrase” *Season Finale*
Where To Watch The Walking Dead: Dead City
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