The Walking Dead will be ending soon, but AMC has already made sure that we know the franchise is going to continue through spin-offs. When it was announced that Carol and Daryl were going to get a joint spin-off after the main show ends, it made sense because Carol and Daryl have been close friends for a long time. But here’s one I didn’t see coming at all: Deadline has broken the news that Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) will be getting a spin-off called Isle of the Dead. Yep, Maggie and the man who bashed in her husband’s head with a baseball bat are going to be hanging out long enough to have their own show together.
Eli Jorné, who has been a writer and co-executive producer on The Walking Dead for multiple seasons, will serve as showrunner on Isle of the Dead, which will see
Maggie and Negan traveling into a post-apocalyptic Manhattan long ago cut off from the mainland. The crumbling city is filled with the dead and denizens who have made New York City their own world full of anarchy, danger, beauty, and terror.
Cohan, Morgan, and Jorné are executive producing Isle of the Dead with Scott M. Gimple, chief content officer of The Walking Dead universe. The series will launch on AMC and AMC+ sometime in 2023. AMC has ordered six episodes of the show.
AMC’s Dan McDermott provided the following statement:
This is a very big day for the expanding universe we are building around The Walking Dead. It not only adds another compelling series to this collection, it extends our storytelling around two unforgettable characters fans have grown to love, hate or hate and then love in Maggie and Negan, brilliantly inhabited by Lauren and Jeffrey. It also lets us explore a corner of this universe located on the island of Manhattan, with an iconic skyline that takes on a very different meaning when viewed through the lens of a zombie apocalypse.”
Gimple added:
Eli has created a chaotic, beautiful, grimy madhouse of the dead for Negan, Maggie, and fans of the show eager to discover an unseen and insane world of the TWD Universe. Lauren and Jeffrey have always been fantastic collaborators and now, we bring that collaboration to the next level with a series that will take these characters to their limits with the world — and each other. All of us are thrilled to take you on an all new, all different TWD epic for the ages.”
I never would have guessed this show would happen, but I’ll be checking out Isle of the Dead when it airs next year.