Television series

The Walking Dead: Dead City

Name: The Walking Dead: Dead City
Genre: Drama, Action, Horror
Released: 2023
Cast: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Lauren Cohan, Logan Kim, Gaius Charles, Željko Ivanek

A spinoff that strips The Walking Dead down to its meanest, funniest core: Negan and Maggie, two people with every reason to kill each other, forced into an uneasy alliance inside a Manhattan long since sealed off and gone feral. It trades the sprawling ensemble for a tighter, nastier odd-couple thriller — crumbling skyscrapers, half-lit tunnels, old grudges. Good for anyone who wants their dread with a pulse.

TVMaze rating

7.0

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The Last of Us2023

The gold standard for prestige zombie TV right now — a mismatched pair forced together by catastrophe, gorgeous direction, and an emotional gut-punch every few episodes that Dead City is clearly borrowing from.

But It's slower and sadder than Dead City, more interested in grief than in action set pieces.

The Walking Dead2010

The mothership. If you want to know how Negan and Maggie actually got to hating each other this much, the eleven-season history is all here, messy and enormous.

But Eleven seasons is a real commitment, and the back half sags under its own sprawl more than once.

Fear the Walking Dead2015no page yet

The sister series that shows the outbreak actually spreading rather than picking up years later — a different flavour of dread, more slow-motion societal collapse than urban siege.

But Quality wobbles across its run, and it never quite escapes the shadow of the original.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Escape from New York1981

Same premise stripped to its bone: Manhattan cut off from the mainland and left to its own outlaws, decades before Dead City used the exact same island-as-wasteland idea.

John Carpenter sealed Manhattan off as a lawless prison island decades before anyone wrote a zombie into it — Snake Plissken stalking the ruins is Dead City's true grandfather.

But No zombies at all, and the pacing, dialogue and effects are unmistakably low-budget early-80s B-movie.

World War Z2013

Big, global, relentlessly paced — this is what a zombie outbreak looks like at planetary scale rather than one walled-off island, and it never stops moving.

But The zombies sprint and swarm rather than shuffle, a very different horror register than Dead City's.

Train to Busan2016

Confined to a speeding train instead of a ruined city, this is claustrophobic zombie horror with real heart underneath it — one of the best the genre has produced.

But It's in Korean with subtitles, and it earns its tears in a way that catches people off guard.

28 Days Later2002

The film that reinvented the modern zombie outbreak — raw, jittery, shot on early digital video, with an emptied-out London that Dead City's Manhattan clearly owes a debt to.

But Its infected run and scream rather than shamble, which changes the whole texture of the dread.

The Girl with All the Gifts2016

A quieter, stranger British take on the genre, built around a child who might be the cure or the end of everything — moral complexity over gore.

But It's a smaller, sadder film than anything in the Walking Dead universe, with almost no action spectacle.

I Am Legend2007

One man alone in an emptied New York City, which makes it the closest mainstream cousin to Dead City's abandoned Manhattan — same loneliness, same crumbling skyline.

But The CGI creatures have aged badly, and the ending was famously reworked and still divides people.

Zombieland2009

If you need a palate cleanser, this is the same collapsed world played entirely for laughs — fast, gory, and genuinely funny rather than grim.

But Nothing here carries the emotional weight of Negan and Maggie's history; it's pure popcorn by comparison.

Chernobyl2019

It's the non-fiction cousin of Dead City's exclusion zone: a place people were forced to abandon, now dangerous and haunted by what's still inside it.

Swap the walking dead for real radioactive ruin and you get the same image Dead City trades on — a city sealed off, half-alive, more frightening for being true.

But It's a true story about mass death and cover-up, told with total seriousness — no thrills, no survivors to root for in the usual sense.

The Night Eats the World2018no page yet

Same siege-city premise as Dead City, played at the opposite volume: no hostage plot, no wisecracks, just what loneliness does to a person trapped in a dead city.

A French zombie film that goes almost entirely silent, following one man alone in a besieged Paris apartment — the horror comes from isolation and time, not action.

But Barely any dialogue, a single location for most of its runtime, and a pace that asks for real patience.