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It's rarely a good sign when a show feels the need to reboot itself very early in its tenure. In the case of The Walking Dead franchise, reboots are not uncommon, but the flagship series at least made it to Season 9 before starting anew was necessary to save the show.
But following the main show's ending in 2022, most of the zombie franchise's spinoffs stumbled out of the gate. While not terrible, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon wiped the slate clean in its third season by replacing the French setting with a Spanish getaway, which proved to be a success for the nearly finished series. Following in its footsteps is its sister series, The Walking Dead: Dead City, which takes a less dramatic approach than the archer-led series but still makes a rather sharp turn. And in its riveting new chapter, Dead City turns its back on its past life to start something fearless.
The Walking Dead: Dead City Starts Over in Season 3
Season 3 picks up immediately after the events of the second season, but the show is quick to forget what happened. The death of Ginny (Mahina Napoleon) is swiftly grieved, New Babylon's impending army is defeated in the blink of an eye, and the Croat (Željko Ivanek), the Dama (Lisa Emery), and Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles) are already being shoved towards the exit.
The Season 3 premiere serves as a cleanup episode, leaving behind former showrunner Eli Jorné's era and entering a new one helmed by Seth Hoffman. The transition is quite jarring and messy; it does too many things at once as it tries to abandon the storyline that the Season 2 finale set up while introducing Season 3's new slate of characters and drama, making the premiere the weakest entry of the season. Though that may sound like a bad omen, trust that it's just a weird episode viewers have to get past. The rest of the season is the strongest the show has ever been.
Now on good terms, Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) go their separate ways to achieve their own personal missions, while occasionally teaming up with one another. Maggie has reunited and made up with her teenage son, Hershel (Logan Kim), allowing herself to look to the future instead of the past. She's working to build a thriving community in Manhattan with Renata (Aimee Garcia) and Luis' (Raúl Castillo) people, as well as the Bricks.
Meanwhile, Negan settles into vacation mode at a local bar owned by Dillard (Jimmi Simpson), playing video games all day and shouting profanities like he just learned how to swear yesterday. Out of all the newcomers this season, Dillard is by far the most dazzling. His codependency on two walkers, whom he believes he can talk to, sheds light on the effects that society’s collapse can have on someone already struggling with his mental health. Simpson, too, is absolutely magnetic, both in his comedic timing and in his portrayal of Dillard as a tragic ticking time bomb.
Dead City Season 3 Reinforces Hope for the Future
As for Maggie's crew, they are written according to the standard formula for Walking Dead survivors, but there's a certain charm to their ordinary qualities. Renata and Luis feel like real survivors anyone would come across, rather than gimmicky cartoon characters. It's also refreshing for Maggie to have a genuine friendship with another woman after all this time, and the potential between Maggie and Luis is a blissful win. What they all achieve together resembles The Walking Dead's prison arc at its most quaint: building a community, conflicts arising out of mundane but critical problems, and building lasting relationships.
It helps that the season has eight episodes to dig into these characters and their backstories. But more episodes would be preferable to justify certain characters removing their masks at the drop of a hat. One can only think of Daenerys Targaryen going full mad queen in this instance: The seeds might've been planted, but there was no care or maintenance to allow a storyline like that to fully bloom with time.
Whereas the past two seasons of Dead City felt incredibly grim and pessimistic, Season 3's mantra is that hope will prevail. This helps the series lean more into its playfulness, letting characters have more animated personalities that feel alive. The dialogue can be genuinely funny at times, especially between Negan and Dillard, but it can also dial it down for more thoughtful exchanges. The downside of an apocalyptic show built on pure hope is that some of the darkness fades, letting in some schmaltzy energy.
Dead City's Maggie and Negan Relationship Is Still Its Biggest Weakness
The series also lacks in subtlety when it comes to its most important relationship: Maggie and Negan. No amount of rebooting or rewriting can conceal how bizarre this pairing is and the injustice it's done to these characters, Maggie specifically. One episode is entirely dedicated to an alternate-reality plot in which the apocalypse never happened, and Maggie and Negan cross paths in New York City. The corny writing hits viewers over the head with the idea that Maggie and Negan are fated together by some invisible string across different lifetimes.
Episodes like this demonstrate how much the franchise has lost its bitterness and bite. Subtext is abandoned because there's no logic behind Maggie and Negan being friends after he brutally killed her husband in front of her and threatened to enslave her as one of his wives. It's like if Billy Butcher decided to spare Homelander and team up with him because they happen to exist in the same place at the same time. Dead City's writing has no choice but to say the quiet parts out loud, because Dead City was not created for a coherent story, but to be a cog in a machine.
To give Hoffman credit, though, he does his best to work with what he inherited. Maggie and Negan's scenes are no longer bogged down by an exhaustive rehashing of the past, and Maggie isn't being tortured by his very presence or by her son being a nasty teenager. They work together because they have skills the other does not, which on its own is growth, but that doesn't rationalize the flirtatious undercurrent between them. For any woman watching this show: Don't get the wrong idea that you have to play nice with your abuser to heal yourself.
The end of Season 3 feels like a proper time to conclude Dead City's cycle, but it's yet to be seen if the show will be renewed for a fourth season. Still, Season 3 does more to push Maggie and Negan forward than the past two seasons ever did, and their arcs are complemented by big ideas about what it means to restore order after years of lawlessness. These ideas hit harder when cool, queasy walker action disturbs this dream. The Walking Dead can never really go back to the glory days, but Dead City Season 3 tries pretty hard to get close.
The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 premieres July 26, 2026 at 9 p.m. ET on AMC and AMC+.
