Ahead of Walking Dead’s New York Spinoff, Zombies Take a Bite of the Big Apple

Though AMC Networks’ The Walking Dead flagship series may have aired its final episode last year, the zombie universe is anything but finished, with several spinoffs on the way.

Now, one of those spinoffs, The Walking Dead: Dead City, is set to premiere on Sunday, and AMC is ramping up the real-world promotion to bring old and new fans to the fictional universe.

With Dead City set in New York, The Walking Dead and AMC Networks partnered with iconic New York establishments this week to promote the upcoming spinoff.

Promotions kicked off on Wednesday in Midtown at a Dead City-themed coffee cart, with a coffee and New Yorker-designed cartoon sleeve giveaway for customers.

Additionally, at H&H Bagels on the Upper West Side, the first 200 customers got a free limited-time bagel: the Walker Wake-Up. Through June 18, fans of the show can buy the bagel sandwich at all three local locations.

At Joe’s Pizza in Times Square, the first 200 fans got two free slices and a merch giveaway, with a similar deal at the New York Hot Dog King Cart in the UES.

And with Lauren Cohan and Jeffery Dean Morgan reprising their characters of Maggie and Negan in the new series, the pair showed up at Katz’s Deli, where Adweek was on hand to see the festivities.

At the iconic location on the Lower East Side, known for its pastrami on rye and that one famous scene in When Harry Met Sally, fans got pastrami sandwiches, coleslaw and merchandise. (Hey, we’ll have what they’re having!) Several of the show’s walkers were spotted eating the New York staple. And Cohan and Morgan’s appearance led to confusion and delight among customers and tourists.

AMC representatives told Adweek the two busiest locations were Joe’s and Katz’s Deli, and that fans started lining up early in the morning for the 3 p.m. activation.

The upcoming spinoff shows weren’t always the plan for AMC.

In 2018, the company announced a trilogy of films starring Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes, but due to a variety of factors like the pandemic and larger industry shifts, the content strategy instead changed to several spinoffs.

For Scott M. Gimple, The Walking Dead Universe’s chief content officer and executive producer, that also came with challenges.

“I would have loved not to announce the spinoffs until after The Walking Dead. That would have been awesome,” Gimple told Adweek during the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour in January, noting that, ideally, fans would not know which characters were surviving the original series finale. 

But in the end, the chief content officer knew the news had to be shared.

“Better to control the narrative yourself and get it out there,” added Gimple. “We announced Maggie and Negan, New York City, that’s really not a lot of information, but I love people being in the moment of the show itself.”

The upcoming spinoffs are designed for fans of The Walking Dead but are also targeting new audiences that may not be familiar with the original IP.

“We constructed these stories so that you don’t need to have watched the shows,” said Gimple. “Dead City is the story of a woman who has to ally herself with the man who horrifically and performatively killed her husband. I think that’s a story for anybody.”

Unlike the flagship series, which premiered on the linear network, Dead City will be comprised of six episodes, which Gimple said creates narrative imperatives that tell the story differently, including a return to advertising, which then speaks to breaks in storytelling.

It’s a new way of telling stories for The Walking Dead’s latest expansion. And with the flagship series originally premiering in 2010, The Walking Dead was due for an upgrade for the streaming world.

“The entire world changed during [TWD’s] lifespan,” said Gimple. “Thank goodness for us, because we have to tell stories in different ways, and streaming makes us do that. Form dictates content.”

The Walking Dead: Dead City premieres on AMC on Sunday, June 18, at 9 p.m. ET.