The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 Lands Jimmi Simpson As Series Regular
The Walking Dead: Dead City beefs up season 3, adding Jimmi Simpson as a series regular alongside Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
AMC is back stomping around Manhattan. Season 3 of 'The Walking Dead: Dead City' is now shooting in Boston, and the show just added a very recognizable new face: Jimmi Simpson.
Jimmi Simpson joins as a series regular
According to Deadline, the Emmy-nominated 'Dark Matter' alum has signed on as a series regular, playing a character named Dillard. That name is literally all they are willing to share right now, which usually means the role matters. Simpson is one of those actors who can slip from charming to unnerving in a blink, so this feels like the right kind of chaos for 'Dead City.'
How we got here
Quick rewind: when 'Dead City' premiered in June 2023, it scored the biggest cable drama debut of the year. The live AMC airing pulled in 683,000 viewers, and once you add the simulcasts on BBC America and IFC plus replays, the opener hit 1.12 million. No shock it earned a Season 2, and that run performed well enough to lock in Season 3, now rolling cameras in Boston.
What 'Dead City' is doing story-wise
The series pairs Maggie and Negan in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan that was cut off from the mainland a long time ago. It is a decaying vertical maze full of walkers and human factions that have turned New York into its own feral ecosystem — part anarchy, part danger, oddly still a little beautiful, definitely terrifying.
Season 2 cranked up a citywide power struggle. Maggie and Negan ended up on opposite sides of that fight; as they kept colliding, both realized there was no easy exit for either of them — just a messier, scarier path forward.
Inside baseball: showrunner shuffle
Eli Jorne — a longtime 'Walking Dead' writer and co-executive producer — ran the first two seasons of 'Dead City.' For Season 3, another franchise veteran, Seth Hoffman, is taking over as showrunner. Not a dramatic change, but notable if you like tracking who is steering which corner of the 'Walking Dead' universe.
The team on and behind the screen
- Leads: Lauren Cohan (Maggie since 'The Walking Dead' Season 2) and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Negan since Season 6) return — and they are also executive producers.
- Executive producers: Seth Hoffman, Scott Gimple, Robert Kirkman, Gale Anne Hurd, Dave Alpert, Brian Bockrath, and Colin Walsh.
- Jimmi Simpson credits: 'Dark Matter,' 'Pachinko,' 'Black Mirror,' 'Westworld,' 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia,' 'Psych,' 'Zodiac,' and plenty more.
Bottom line: 'Dead City' keeps expanding, and bringing in Simpson as Dillard is the kind of swing that could tilt the Manhattan chessboard in interesting ways. We will see where he fits once AMC stops playing coy with the details.