Eli Jorné had worked in the writers’ room on The Walking Dead in the tenth season. He wrote three episodes. He later dedicated himself to the development of projects for both AMC and other channels. But when Scott Gimple, the creative director of this fictional universe, called him if he wanted to write a spin-off, he said yes. He had even thought before the proposal of which characters he would want to tell a story if offered: Maggie and Negan.
“I feel attracted to characters who connect with their dark side and Negan also has a very funny point of black humor,” Jorné reasons in a conversation with La Vanguardia. He was fascinated by the following approach: “What would it be like for Maggie to live with the man who killed her husband? How do you survive and navigate all those feelings and the anger and the pain? And, as Gimple bought into the idea, the viewer has The Walking Dead: Dead City tonight on AMC at 11pm, right after the end of Fear the Walking Dead Season 8, and also on the AMC streaming service. .
The spin-off takes place months after the events that occurred in the outcome of the mother series. Maggie needs Negan’s help if she wants to get her child back, and that means embarking on a joint excursion to Manhattan. There operates the dangerous Croatian played by Željko Ivanek, the winner of an Emmy for his work in Damages.
“Ivanek is a very charismatic actor, like Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and watching him play is a joy, it’s one of the reasons I became a screenwriter,” the screenwriter rejoices. “Part of the appeal of him is the way he tries to bring back the Negan we knew, that tyrannical monster that drew the viewer in, who would do heinous acts like smashing skulls with a smile and catch you off guard,” he advances.
From a good start, however, Dead City didn’t work on the page. It didn’t happen until he set the plot in New York. “During the season we will see how different groups of people have survived in a desolate panorama with streets full of walkers and walkers even falling from the sky”, explains Jorné. It is a vertical and claustrophobic world in which the inhabitants had to find their way to find provisions, move or face the different threats.
This time, in addition, Jorné not only has Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as lead actors but also as executive producers, which implies that they have some control over the creative direction of the series. “They are very collaborative and have been very helpful in outlining the scripts,” he acknowledges.
The creator and showrunner, after all, was only in the tenth season of The Walking Dead and, on the other hand, Cohan had been with the project since the second season and Morgan since the seventh. “Sometimes I ask them if they think their characters would make a certain choice. And, when they propose to change a dialogue so that it sounds more like Negan or Maggie, they are always right, ”he admits.
This spin-off, which Jorné hopes will return for a second season after these initial six episodes, is the beginning of a new era. AMC has Daryl Dixon in production with actor Norman Reedus discovering the underworld of Paris and Rick and Michonne with Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira returning to the zombie universe to close the arc of their characters. The walking dead is over but, like the walkers, it is far from dead.
