Years after the final events of The Walking Dead, Maggie (Lauren Cohan) tracks her kidnapped son to Manhattan. The man who stole him is one of Negan’s old horde. She knows what she has to do.

Like stablemate Daryl Dixon, Dead City benefits from its streamlined cast and premise. There’s an urgency and a drive to this which is established by Maggie, barely conscious with rage, beating a Walker to a pulp in the opening minutes. It never slows down either and the show has the added bonus of Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the foundation it builds on. They were always two of the best cast members of the original show and here they easily fill the additional space. Morgan’s Negan is an older warhorse now, a man who still finds himself charming but is running out of places to run from himself. Maggie calls him on that and it’s such an interesting, nuanced performance that you almost forget just what Negan did. The show reminds you not long after, and even better builds its premise from the blood Negan spilt. We only glimpse the Croat (king of the character actors Zelijko Ivanek), but, coupled with Negan’s description of him as one of his worst, it’s enough. The world may have rebuilt a surprising amount, but the wreckage men like Negan and the Croat leave behind never quite gets cleared away.

Morgan is impressive through, but the cast members that stay with you (aside from a brief, welcome cameo from Picard’s Michelle Hurd) are Cohan and Gaius Charles. Charles, as the Marshal chasing Negan down, is every inch the equal of the man he’s hunting. Charming, brutal, funny and worst of all, a zealot in the exact way Negan isn’t anymore. He does something truly despicable here and clearly thinks he’s doing it for the right reasons. Whether he gets to realize that isn’t true, we’ll have to see. In the meantime though he’s a threat on a level Maggie hasn’t experienced since, weirdly, Negan. Just as relentless, just as skilled, just as personal and just as close on her heels.

But right now this is Cohan’s show. She seethes like no one else, and the way she wears Maggie’s rage here is incredibly compelling. Maggie is a woman who has spent most of her adult life doing a passable impression of being okay when she is anything but. The horror of what was done to her family is that the only person who truly understands her is the person who did this to her. Likewise Negan, a war criminal turned protector of small children, is trapped in the life he’s built on the bodies of the people he’s killed. The only person who knows who he is the one person he knows can never forgive him.

Verdict: Dead City is off to a great start. It’s cheerily nasty, cleverly advances the overall world of the franchise and sets Maggie and Negan up as either a double act or nemeses. Odds are, both. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart