40 fantasy and sci-fi shows to watch this year

The Walking Dead: Dead City

2022 was a historic year for AMC’s long-running zombie series The Walking Dead. After 11 seasons on the air, the show wrapped up with some explosive final episodes. But the whole idea of The Walking Dead is that it is a never-ending zombie story that examines how people adjust to the new world after society has collapsed. It also happens to be one of AMC’s most successful series. So you knew they weren’t really going to let this one go.

We’ll be getting a wave of new Walking Dead spinoffs this year. The first one to hit AMC is The Walking Dead: Dead City, a spinoff which follows Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) as they head to New York City to see what zombified horrors await there.

Pairing Maggie and Negan is curious since there’s a lot of bad blood between them. Negan brutally murdered Maggie’s husband Glenn in front of her during the show’s season 7 premiere. Whether Maggie could ever forgive Negan — now reformed after spending years in imprisonment at Alexandria — was a huge running question that lasted right up until the end of the original series.

The Walking: Dead City premieres on AMC and AMC+ on June 18, and will run for six episodes.

More Walking Dead!

After Dead City, The Walking Dead lineup becomes harder to define. There are some shows we know are coming this year, but AMC has yet to confirm which will air when. A six-episode limited series centered around Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Guirira) was originally confirmed to be coming out in 2023, with production already underway. However, the date has since been shifted forward; the Rick and Michonne spinoff is officially coming in 2024 now.

Meanwhile, Norman Reedus is currently filming a spinoff about his character Daryl Dixon. That one is set in France, which could be really interesting as we haven’t seen much of how the zombie pandemic has affected places out the U.S. The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon was originally supposed to be about Daryl and his bestie Carol, but Melissa McBride decided to step away from the series, so it’s just Daryl now.

Daryl’s spinoff began filming before Rick and Michonne’s, and we now know for certain it will come out first. We don’t know yet how many episodes Daryl Dixon will run, but it’s likely it won’t start until after Dead City wraps up. So we’re expecting to see this one sometime in fall 2023.

In the meantime, there’s also Fear the Walking Dead, the first and longest-running Walking Dead spinoff. That one will be coming back for its eighth and final season this year, split into two chunks of six episodes a piece. The first set of episodes starts airing on May 14 2023, with the second batch arriving later in the year.