Seth Hoffman clearly had some thoughts. Luckily, AMC was willing to listen, because as The Walking Dead: Dead City was sort of headed nowhere, Hoffman stepped in, asked someone to hold his beer, and figured out how to alter the course of a series quickly headed for cancellation. If you look at the live ratings for Dead City compared to The Walking Dead at basically any point during its run, they’re critically lower. I know we’re not really into linear television anymore, but let’s also be honest: not that many people have AMC+. The benefit of AMC+ used to be getting episodes a few days in advance. Now you get them basically the morning of, and I’m not sure that’s enough for Walking Dead fans. Especially since we seem to be winding down, even though there’s still discussion about future spinoffs, perhaps just at a slower pace. I’m not sure how much slower than two shows you can go except one, but apparently that’s the future. Hoffman, who previously worked on the original The Walking Dead beginning in Season 4, has now taken over Dead City as showrunner, basically doing that thing where somebody comes in, hates everything about what was happening, rips out the guts, keeps the important parts and sends everything else away.

I’m going to have to talk about spoilers, because this season is full of them and it’s nearly impossible to discuss what Hoffman accomplished without spoiling something. Basically, where we left most of these characters last season doesn’t matter anymore. If your name isn’t Negan, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Maggie, played by Lauren Cohan, or Hershel, played by Logan Kim, you were instantly expendable. Hoffman rapidly started reshaping the series, dumping storylines and characters wherever possible. The Croat? Gone. The Dama? Gone. Perlie Armstrong, played by Gaius Charles? Sent back home. Other characters either assimilated into the new direction or disappeared. It was the closest thing Dead City could get to hitting a reset button without actually canceling the show and starting over. The problem is that I think Hoffman overplayed his hand a little by sending Perlie away. There was nothing inherently wrong with the character, and since he had ended up on the same side as Maggie and Negan, I would have liked to see what Hoffman could have done with him. Instead, almost nothing from the first two seasons survives beyond the three characters the franchise absolutely cannot lose.

In their place, we get three new major characters, and each one brings something interesting. There’s Renata, played by Aimee Garcia, the de facto leader of this new community; her brother Luis, played by Raúl Castillo, who is conveniently a doctor; and Dillard, played by Jimmi Simpson, a strange, wickedly intelligent man with an equally strange method of keeping his little slice of Manhattan running with electricity. I liked Renata because she’s almost overly optimistic about her leadership and her ability to keep people alive. She reminded me a little of Ezekiel from the original series, someone who sees peace within her community and believes she can maintain it through diplomacy and trade until eventually that philosophy reaches a breaking point. Luis might be the most practically useful character you could introduce into The Walking Dead because, my God, you always need doctors. The original series proved that repeatedly with amputations, wounds, childbirth and every other medical emergency imaginable. If you’re actually trying to grow a community instead of merely surviving another week, Luis is invaluable. Then there’s Dillard, the wild card, who is incredibly smart and also more than a little crazy. His strange bromance with Negan is one of the best things about the first half of the season, and Simpson gives Dillard his own flavor, something that is surprisingly difficult this many years into The Walking Dead universe. He actually feels fresh.

That’s something these spinoffs desperately need, because Dead City and Daryl Dixon have both struggled to build ensembles. The original Walking Dead routinely had 16-episode seasons, with its final season stretching to 24. These shows are trying to tell entire arcs in eight episodes, while focusing on established characters, introducing new characters, developing them and somehow making us care before half of them get killed or written out. That’s counterproductive to what made The Walking Dead work. Look at Rick’s group by the Alexandria era. Those people didn’t all come from the same place. They arrived during different seasons, through different circumstances, and gradually became a family. Maggie herself is the perfect example. If Glenn never met Rick and never eventually reached the Greene family farm, he never meets Maggie and Hershel Rhee never exists. Negan doesn’t arrive until much later. The Walking Dead became great at assimilating people into its ensemble. Dead City can’t survive forever as The Maggie and Negan Show Featuring Hershel. Hoffman needs characters around them, and more importantly, AMC needs to let him keep some of them alive.

Hershel might actually be Hoffman’s greatest magic trick. With what feels like the snap of a finger, he went from being one of the most obnoxious characters in The Walking Dead universe to being normal. He’s not constantly angsty, huffing and puffing, obsessing over the Dama or seemingly plotting against Maggie, Negan or both. They’ve stopped trying to turn Hershel into a villain and started letting him become a hero. Luis takes him under his wing and begins teaching him medicine, and while I’m not sure I’d personally let Hershel operate on me just because he watched Luis do it a few times, this finally gives him direction. There’s something of Glenn emerging in his son now, and the season repeatedly acknowledges that family history through little touches involving things like Glenn’s watch and Maggie’s ring. This is the first time Dead City has made me genuinely interested in who Hershel could become. Had the Hershel from the first two seasons been killed off, I wouldn’t have cared. This Hershel I want to see grow up.

The Maggie and Luis relationship also gives Maggie something the show desperately needs: another person to bounce off of who isn’t Negan. Their road-trip episode gives them some chemistry and even suggests the possibility that Maggie might someday move forward from Glenn, although she clearly isn’t sure whether she can. Meanwhile, Luis needs medical supplies to keep his hospital running, Maggie needs this community to survive, and suddenly Dead City starts feeling less like an excuse to keep Maggie and Negan together and more like an actual Walking Dead show about building something. That matters because the series is becoming dangerously reliant on Maggie and Negan to the point where there’s occasionally this bizarre flirtatious energy between them. Please never go there. It’s scary. Even the alternate-reality episode dances around it. These two never actually hook up, thank God, but Luis illustrates why Maggie needs relationships outside Negan. Now find somebody for Negan. Hershel needs a friend too, not just Luis as his mentor. There’s a whole community sitting right there. Flesh these people out. Let us fall in love with them. And for the love of walkers, don’t immediately kill everybody.

Episode 6, “Genesis,” is probably the season’s biggest swing, imagining an alternate reality where the apocalypse never happened and asking whether Maggie and Negan could have become friends under completely different circumstances. It also gives longtime fans the surprise return of Beth, with Emily Kinney reprising the role, which is exactly the kind of thing these shows should occasionally be doing. Dead City takes place on American soil, and there are dozens of surviving characters from the original series who could plausibly cross paths with this story. Maggie is building a community with a hospital, medicine, food and crops. Why couldn’t that eventually attract attention from somewhere like the Commonwealth? They still have scouts. There are possibilities here. The only thing that annoyed me about the Beth return was unnecessarily tying Luis into that alternate reality too. We didn’t need everything connected by fate. Sometimes a guy can just live in the same universe without destiny sticking a Post-it note on his forehead.

The biggest problem is that Hoffman eventually runs out of runway. The first six episodes feel like someone systematically identifying what wasn’t working and fixing it. Then Episodes 7 and 8 arrive and suddenly decisions start flipping on a dime. Smart characters stop asking questions that the audience is already asking. There’s a catalyst near the end of Episode 5 that helps explain some of what follows, but the final stretch still feels rushed. That’s why my advice to AMC moving forward is simple: now that you have Seth Hoffman, ask him how many episodes he actually needs to coherently tell a season of The Walking Dead: Dead City. Because I have a feeling longtime fans noticed the change in quality immediately, but it still feels like Hoffman is on a leash, tethered to the same cookie-cutter structure that was already causing problems. You handed him a house that was more than a little bit of a fixer-upper and gave him an unreasonable amount of time to renovate it. It’s not finished. It just looks a hell of a lot better than it did.

And that brings me to AMC’s audio description, because what happened this season is ridiculous. I watched this like a fan would. I watched every episode on AMC+ when it dropped before its linear airing, and only one of the eight episodes had audio description available to me when it initially dropped. Yet AMC+ is going to label the season as having audio description? One episode out of eight should not earn you an audio-description label. I recap this show on my YouTube channel, and I actually had sighted viewers commenting about how crazy it was that a blind film critic was having to recap The Walking Dead: Dead City without audio description because even they understand how visual this show is. The Walking Dead is my favorite television series of all time. I know this universe. I know these characters. I know their histories. I drop Walking Dead quotes in real life that nobody recognizes because I think I might be the last remaining Walking Dead fan on Earth. I also wasn’t always blind. I lost my vision during the run of the original series and found out very quickly how much it sucks when your favorite franchise suddenly isn’t accessible to you.

For a while, I had to sit through Walking Dead spinoffs without audio description at all. Now I can sometimes get description months later when something lands on Netflix, but AMC+ has started advertising that it offers accessibility. Great. Then do accessibility. If audio-description tracks exist for all eight episodes, getting one of them uploaded correctly is not enough. It should be the reverse, where maybe one episode accidentally misses its track because somebody made a clerical error. Seven failures out of eight isn’t a clerical error. If somebody at virtually any job is given eight tasks and fails seven of them, eventually somebody is going to ask what exactly they’re doing there. Accessibility isn’t something you slap onto a label so you can say you have it. Blind subscribers need the track when everybody else gets the episode.

This season also exposes a larger problem with The Walking Dead universe. Daryl Dixon has faced its own version of this, constantly changing locations and ensembles while relying on Daryl and Carol because those are the characters AMC knows people will watch. Dead City has Maggie and Negan. These spinoffs keep getting trapped by their own premises while new creative teams are asked to somehow fix them from inside the box. Hoffman did a bang-up job considering the box he inherited. I love Jeffrey Dean Morgan. I love Lauren Cohan. And the three major new additions are terrific, especially Jimmi Simpson, who somehow found a version of a Walking Dead survivor I don’t feel like I’ve already met six times. But Hoffman needs the latitude to build an ensemble, develop complicated storylines and actually surprise us. Some of the greatest Walking Dead moments were earned because the series spent time building characters and relationships before pulling the rug out. Even with the comic books providing a roadmap, the show could swap characters, alter outcomes or invent someone like Daryl entirely. Dead City doesn’t have enough characters to surprise us with right now. Negan is practically unkillable because the show couldn’t survive his death. Maggie can’t carry this alone, and Hershel just finally developed a personality.

Seth Hoffman might be the cure for the virus. AMC just has to give him enough latitude to actually fix the patient. If that means more episodes, a larger recurring cast or simply enough money to retain characters who aren’t named Maggie, Negan and Hershel, then that’s what Dead City needs. If word of mouth gets out that Season 3 is actually good and people catch up, maybe some viewers come back for Season 4. There’s an actual future here now, which is something I wasn’t convinced of after the first two seasons. Hoffman inherited a struggling spinoff, gutted what wasn’t working, introduced stronger characters, fixed Hershel, gave Maggie and Negan more interesting material and created a direction that feels capable of lasting. Then you can practically feel AMC grabbing his ankle before he reaches the finish line. Thanks to continued strong performances from franchise regulars Lauren Cohan and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, three excellent new additions in Aimee Garcia, Raúl Castillo and Jimmi Simpson, and a renewed creative spark from Seth Hoffman, The Walking Dead: Dead City Season 3 is the kind of shot in the arm any struggling show dreams of getting. It isn’t perfect, but it’s by far the best season yet. If you stopped watching, maybe take another look. Dead City finally has a pulse.

Fresh: 7.8/10