The Walking Dead: Dead City is best when it forgets it’s a Walking Dead show

polygon.com:

With 11 seasons of a main series, eight seasons of a companion series, and various other spinoffs either currently running or in the works, the Walking Dead franchise has covered a lot of ground in the zombie genre. It’s such a cultural staple, with its shock value having mutated into by-the-numbers mayhem, that refreshing it on a conceptual level seems impossible. But The Walking Dead: Dead City attempts to do that, and is halfway successful. Its thematic power is built solely on how much you’re willing to care about the emotional trauma of characters in The Walking Dead at this late stage, but its best moments come when it leaves their former world behind.

Dead City sees Lauren Cohan return as Maggie — who, aside from a brief detour into other projects, has been a reliable mainstay of the show since season 2 — teaming up with Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan, a character who began the series in the final moments of season 6 as a vile warlord bashing in beloved characters’ heads with a baseball bat. Through some fairly laborious seasons, he’d evolve into a will-he/won’t-he sort of antihero, the kind of guy with a warped code of ethics who’s willing to play along with the good guys if it means not getting eaten or shot.

So they’re a bit of an odd couple, even if you ignore the fact that one of those baseball bat’d heads belonged to Maggie’s late husband, Glenn, the most likable character that the franchise ever produced. Glenn and Maggie’s kid, Hershel, has recently been kidnapped, leaving Maggie to seek Negan’s help in the rescue mission.

The Walking Dead was set, for the most part, in the humid Southeast, where empty rural views often gave way to shots of massive zombie hordes walking across pastures and fields. Dead City