Jeffrey Dean Morgan Looks So Very Tired

I keep tabs on what’s trending on Google, and ahead of the second-season premiere of The Walking Dead: Dead City, I saw “Jeffrey Dean Morgan Dead” trending so often that, by Sunday, it prompted a counter-trend: “Jeffrey Dean Morgan Alive.” I assume people were just trying to confirm that the man who plays Negan was still among the living.

He is, but my god, he looks exhausted. In an interview with Variety, acknowledging that he’s played the character for ten seasons now, Morgan said he’d keep going “until I’m too old to do this anymore, which I’m getting dangerously close to.” That’s evident in the second-season premiere of Dead City. Not in how he looks (he’s still a great-looking guy), but in his energy. His performance radiates bone-tired indifference.

To be fair, some of that’s in the script. At the end of last season, Negan surrendered himself to Manhattan’s ruling powers — The Dama (Lisa Emery) and her enforcer, The Croat (Zeljko Ivanek) — in exchange for Maggie’s (Lauren Cohan) son, Hershel (Logan Kim), going free. Since then, Negan’s been imprisoned, refusing to revive his “Negan” persona in service of The Dama’s dream of uniting Manhattan’s underground factions under her rule. He’s been biding his time in a cell, surviving on cockroaches and charming the guards.

(For those who quit The Walking Dead years ago: Negan eventually took a face turn after a seven-year stint in jail and earned back most people’s trust. Maggie, understandably, took a lot longer to come around, since Negan bashed in the head of her husband, Glenn. We wrote about that arc here.)

Eventually, The Dama blackmails Negan into resurrecting his old persona by threatening his loved ones elsewhere. So Morgan has to step back into the role, not as the weary, post-redemption Negan, but the swaggering, smirking original. The problem is, neither the character nor the actor seem the least bit interested in doing it. And it shows.

Ten years ago, Morgan brought scads of charisma and menace to the role. A decade later, the franchise has wrung it all out of him. He hung on too long. Now it feels like he’s trapped in the character. His heart’s not in it, and why would it be? The writers have reduced him to a ceremonial figurehead in a silly post-apocalyptic fiefdom that powers itself with methane from decomposing zombie corpses. In Dune, it’s spice. In Mad Max, it’s water. In Dead City, it’s zombie gas.

(On that note, we’ve questioned the entire point of this spin-off before.)

On the other end, Lauren Cohan is still dragging out that bad Southern accent, fourteen years after she originated the role of Maggie. She, Hershel, and Negan’s ward, Ginny (whom Maggie has agreed to look after), are now part of New Babylon, yet another authoritarian city-state in a franchise overflowing with them. They’re forming an “exploratory committee” to investigate Manhattan as a future home because it was once the center of art and commerce, and hey! Cool skyscrapers.

New Babylon is the kind of place that hangs people for dodging conscription. Perlie Armstrong (Gaius Charles) is the sheriff, and Dascha Polanco plays Major Lucia Narvaez, one of its leaders. Maggie doesn’t want to go back to Manhattan, but agrees to join the committee on the condition that New Babylon stops forcing others to go. Lucia tells her she’ll need to prove she’s worth 20 people. Maggie obliges by fending off a zombie horde, alongside Ginny.

Maggie agrees to the mission but leaves Hershel and Ginny behind, both of whom, of course, will end up following her. And that’s the setup. Nothing we haven’t seen a dozen times before in The Walking Dead and its many spin-offs: Maggie and Negan, once again, reluctantly working for systems they don’t believe in, almost certainly destined to fight each other before inevitably teaming up to overthrow their respective overlords.

It feels like a metaphor: Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, trudging along for a franchise long past its prime. Maybe it’s time for them to team up again, this time to turn on AMC and finally put this thing out of its misery. Let JDM have some peace and return from whence he came: Transcending B-movies, just waiting for the right role to make him the next Gerard Butler.