I Broke Up With The Walking Dead, But The Walking Dead: Dead City Might Bring Me Back

Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. Check out the last entry Daredevil: Born Again — An Unexpected Connection to the Netflix Series Could Right a Decade-Old Wrong.

This column contains spoilers for The Walking Dead franchise.

When people bring up The Walking Dead, I always cheerfully change the subject with a simple “I broke up with that show.” It’s dramatic, it’s definitive, and the cheery way I deliver the sentiment is, I suppose, somewhat unnerving. If people pry further, I explain that I loved it, it broke my heart too many times — I will never stop being mad about the pointless death of Beth Greene (Emily Kinney) — and then I left.

See? Breakup. A blissful one that I have never had second thoughts over until The Walking Dead: Dead City. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

There was a time, early on, when almost every dang moment in The Walking Dead was engaging. We were engrossed! The whole world (the whole world that had AMC or applicable streaming services, that is) would tune in every Sunday to find out what was going to happen to the crew. We even tolerated the show treating “we [humans] are the walking dead” as some kind of revelation! It was addictive, right up until it wasn’t. I can go on and on about how shows like The Walking Dead require hope to be interesting, and killing off your only two hopeful characters (Beth and Chad L. Coleman’s Tyrese) back to back with Negan on the horizon (and then somehow making that situation even more bleak) and expecting people to remain engaged is a fundamental writing failure, but that’s not the point here. The point is that I have been blissfully separated from this franchise for a decade, but there is something about the Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Maggie (Lauren Cohen) spinoff The Walking Dead: Dead City that I find absolutely fascinating.

The trailer for Season 2 of the spinoff dropped this week, pulling the series from the “out of sight, out of mind” section of my brain and reminding me, yet again, to look at this crazy-ass series. Something about the show’s absurd premise of putting a widow on a quest with the man who brutally murdered her husband in cold blood right in front of her is intriguing in a way that grabs my attention every time it comes up. What do you mean Negan and Maggie are working together?

It’s a premise so insane that it manages to outweigh the question of “how the hell does Daryl (Norman Reedus) get to France in the middle of the apocalypse?!” I don’t actually care enough about how Daryl made it to France, or how Carol (Melissa McBride) somehow followed separately, to find out. But I do, for some unfathomable reason, find myself engaged by the idea of Maggie and Negan being forced into what is, perhaps, the strangest team-up in television history. A thought that I have after watching 15 seasons of Morgan’s former series, Supernatural, and witnessing those idiot boys team up with nearly every villain they encounter at one point or another. You’d think that would prepare me for any “working with your mortal enemy situation,” and yet…

Beyond all of that, there’s a scene in The Walking Dead: Dead City’s Season 2 trailer that shows Maggie wielding Lucille, Negan’s treasured bat that was used to brain her beloved husband Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun). That frame alone is enough to tickle my brain in a way that I start to wonder “what if I gave this spinoff a chance?” before I snap back to reality and remember that way lays endless frustration.

Even still, I have to praise the writers without seeing a single episode of the spinoff. Ideas may be cheap, but engaging an audience up front is not easy, and sparking the curiosity of someone who broke up with your franchise and never looked back is even harder. They have created a premise that intrigues in a way that The Walking Dead has been unable to accomplish in years. So much so that there may come a day where, in a moment of weakness, I hit play on that first episode and give Maggie and Negan’s absurd (platonic) pairing a chance to wow me beyond my initial “damn, that’s interesting.”

Over the years The Walking Dead has remained alive thanks to international views, which has me curious: if you’re in the U.S., have you been watching The Walking Dead: Dead City or any of the show’s other spinoffs? And for the international folks that have remained loyal to the franchise, what keeps you engaged after all these years?