Every other article about The Walking Dead opens with a pun about the franchise being its own shambling corpse as it plods on into the future despite its cultural cache waning, but there’s no better indicator that a horror franchise is failing than its moving to New York City (unless it’s Scream VI). That’s exactly what’s happening in the newest spinoff series The Walking Dead: Dead City, which just dropped its first trailer today.
While it may be fun to poke at The Walking Dead‘s drop off from full-force cultural phenomenon to an overplayed franchise, the series is still a huge ratings draw for AMC and clearly something it’s still investing money into, as the Dead City trailer shows. The new series definitely looks slick enough and is bringing back fan-favorite characters Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan). The pair find themselves looking for Maggie’s son in a fallen NYC, which has been cut off from the mainland throughout the show’s events. This has led to a crowded mass of zombies and survivors functioning in their own little world. It’s not exactly an original premise, but it does look promising.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-b4rvLJmI
The series comes from Eli Jorné, who produced and wrote for The Walking Dead, and it is somewhat of a kickoff of a new era for the franchise as the original show has ended and Fear the Walking Dead is about to start its final season. That will leave Dead City to start a slate of new ones. It will be followed by The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon and an untitled six-episode series led by Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira). The latter is a replacement for the canceled trilogy of films that were set to star Lincoln and focus on his actions after he left the original series.
The Walking Dead: Dead City will premiere on AMC on June 18.
