The Walking Dead: Dead City, premiering Sunday, June 18, is the latest series in the Walking Dead-verse. The new series throws together tough, heroic Maggie Greene Rhee, played by Lauren Cohan, and reformed villain Ray Negan, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan. The characters and actors are veterans of the original Walking Dead, which is based on the comics created by Robert Kirkman.
Maggie hates Negan – the first time they met, he beat her husband Glenn (Steven Yeun) to death with a baseball bat in front of her in The Walking Dead Season 7 premiere. By the time of The Walking Dead series finale (Season 11, Episode 18, November 20, 2022), Maggie can just about accept that Negan has a right to exist. Still, he’s the last person she wants as a traveling companion. However, circumstances require the duo to go to New York City in search of Maggie and Glenn’s kidnapped son Herschel (Logan Kim).
Dead City executive producer Scott M. Gimple, Chief Content Officer of The Walking Dead universe, is also an executive producer on the other two upcoming spinoffs, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon and The Walking Dead’s Untitled Rick & Michonne Series. The Walking Dead: Dead City co-creator and showrunner Eli Jornè joined The Walking Dead mothership’s writing/producing staff in 2019. The two men sat down to talk about taking an undead bite of the Big Apple. An important note: With the writers’ strike going on, WGA members are not promoting current work; this interview was conducted back in January at the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena, California.
If Gimple had known that Negan would become a protagonist as he has, might the character have been introduced less brutally in The Walking Dead? “That’s all the Robert Kirkman comics. Negan is Robert’s incredibly iconic and very distinctive creation. So, no. Robert put us in a hard spot to continue with this character. But it’s been such a great challenge.”
Jornè adds, “As someone who was not around for [Negan’s introduction], and just as a fan, I love that that’s how it opened. I liked Glenn, too, but I think so much of great storytelling is digging yourself out of a hole, whether it’s story-wise or with a character emotionally. I think for Negan to be set up that way, you know that if he’s going to go on a journey, it’s going to be a hell of a journey.”
Maggie and Negan are an unlikely duo, and having the two team up together, given their history, was bound to present some challenges.
“That’s part of the premise of the show,” says Jornè. “What you learn early on is, he has his own reasons for going on this journey. If you look at Maggie and you think of all the people she’s lost in her life, who does she have left who matters to her the most? The biggest reason I could ever think of is something having to do with her son.”
“It’s the dependence on one another after everything has happened that is one of the engines of the story,” Gimple elaborates. “There’s one recontextualized visit to the past that I particularly love. The stakes are incredibly high.”
Gimple says that (like most producers) he can’t directly discuss the budget of Dead City, but that making it is “a whole different ballgame” than either The Walking Dead or its initial spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead, which were shot in Georgia and Texas, respectively, with longtime crews. “There are different challenges in it budgetarily. Some people came out [to New York], old-school people, new-school people. We shot a lot in New Jersey for Manhattan, a little bit in New York.”
The trailers for Dead City show the characters contending with, among other menaces, zombies dropping onto them out of high-rise buildings. What else does New York bring to the universe?
Gimple notes, “Something Eli said [during a Q&A panel] that I think is important is, this is well over a decade into the apocalypse, and it isn’t just the Walkers there. What is the society, or at least the way that people have survived, there? And how has New York City transformed into a place where people are struggling to survive in a very different way than they might have been struggling to survive currently? The people are just as distinctive as the Walkers.”
Given the legends surrounding the New York sewers, we have to wonder whether Dead City will get into the C.H.U.D. of it all.
Gimple laughs. “We might not see any C.H.U.D.s, not yet, but there’s something almost C.H.U.D.-adjacent. We do deal with sewers, and there are some incredibly screwed-up things that came out of some of Eli’s horror fascinations and that Greg Nicotero brought to life in a way that took months of planning.”
Nicotero, a Walking Dead executive producer, director, and effects makeup designer (with KNB EFX) on all Walking Dead series, was in France, heading up the making of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon during most of Dead City‘s production. However, Gimple relates, “We would dream, Eli would dream, the dreams were presented to Greg, and he would bring them to life. Some of the Walker stuff in this series is some of the best in the history of all the shows.”
As to whether advances in VFX and FX makeup affect the storytelling in Dead City, Gimple replies, “It all comes down to the cumulative wisdom that Greg has accrued over all this time. He came into this with a lot of knowledge beyond the creativity and artistry of it, but all of his systems got optimized. He’s a very practical visual effects guy. There are some manufacturing things, like 3D printing, that come into it that we weren’t doing in 2010, but for the most part, I think it’s his particular set of skills.”
Do Gimple and Jornè think that people who are familiar with The Walking Dead will experience Dead City differently than those who come to it uninitiated?
Jornè opines, “For people who have watched the show and feel very connected to Maggie and Negan, we’re only going to go deeper into those characters. We’re going to learn more about them as people, we’re going to learn more about their dynamics. As a writer, I am always attracted to broken people who have fallen apart and are just struggling to put the pieces back together. That’s why I was connected to these characters.
“Another exciting thing for fans is seeing how people survive in new ways, and how creative they are, and new Walker situations that you could not have had in the woods of Georgia. It’s going to be a lot of bloody, gory, awesome stuff, but people will also really experience something emotional with these characters. Hopefully, whether you know them at the beginning or not, you’re going to enjoy all of that ride.”
Gimple says, “L.C. and J.D.M. are at their best in this series. Their performances are remarkable. And the big thing in TV, or even in stories, is you want the audience saying, ‘Whoa, what’s up with that guy? What’s up with that gal?’ They jump off the screen. If you don’t know who they are, there’s a singular sort of adventure to be had in discovering these people for the first time. People who love them will not be disappointed. If you love The Walking Dead, you’re obviously going to love the new show. If you’ve never seen The Walking Dead, I think it might show you what The Walking Dead is.”
