Lots of news out of AMC during this Comic Con period, as yesterday we learned that the upcoming Rick and Michonne series is called “The Ones Who Live” instead of uh, Rick and Michonne.
But more pressingly than that, AMC has announced that Dead City, the Negan/Maggie series in Manhattan which just ended its first season, will be renewed for season 2. They have also announced that Daryl Dixon, the upcoming series that strands Daryl in France, will also be renewed for season 2 despite it not even being released until September 10, two months from now.
If you watched Dead City, you can clearly see how it’s set up for a second season based on how it ends, with the Maggie/Negan situation far from resolved, and I don’t just mean they’re baggage. The series has essentially introduced two fully new factions, and now it appears like Maggie and Negan will be more or less be leading rival ones, respectively, as they go to war with each other.
Daryl Dixon, meanwhile, who knows? We know close to nothing about the series other than random images shown as promos, and the idea that Daryl is trying to figure out how and why he’s suddenly been taken to France. I guess he knows as much as we do.
It was never exactly clear what AMC’s plans were with these spin-offs, as for a time, it felt like maybe at six episodes each, they were supposed to be one-off miniseries. But for at least Dead City and Daryl, more seasons were indeed planned, and this is not Netflix. If AMC wants more Walking Dead, they make more Walking Dead. And they are never going to give up The Walking Dead.
My main question is whether the seasons will expand. Both The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead had six episode season 1s, and expanded from there. Will the second seasons of these shows get bigger, or stay six episodes? I am less sure what’s going on with The Ones Who Live, as I could swear that one was pitched as a miniseries concluding the tale of Rick and Michonne, but we’ll see. That airs in 2024.
These spin-offs are about to be the only Walking Dead series in existence. The main show ended six months ago, and Fear the Walking Dead is (mercifully) ending its final season. World Beyond was always meant to be a two-season miniseries, and Tales of the Walking Dead, the standalone anthology series, may not be coming back.
If we are just judging by Dead City, the new spin-off era, despite being initially ridiculed, is starting off…pretty good! I really did quite like Dead City in the end, with the smaller cast and lack of baggage from a decade of the first series really helping to make it work. As did the return of “old Negan” to a certain extent. I am looking forward to Daryl Dixon as well, to see if they can replicate that effect there.
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