The Walking Dead may be losing Maggie for Season 9. Actress Lauren Cohan has been fielding potential new roles while negotiating her contract with AMC and has now officially accepted a new role in the pilot for ABC's Whiskey Cavalier. Whether that means she's off The Walking Dead in Season 9, or will stay on in some limited capacity, or even whether Whiskey Cavalier ever makes it past the pilot, all remains to be seen.
And here's an unpopular opinion: Losing Maggie will actually be good for the show. Maggie has been a stale character for ages now, and the show's producers have completely wasted her character arc and potential.
By the end of Season 6 she was sick and feverish and we were all worried that her baby was infected. So Rick and company tried to take her to Hilltop to see the doctor there. On the way, Negan and the Saviors ambushed them, killing Abraham and Glenn. Somehow between that ambush and where we're at now, Maggie is (inexplicably) no longer sick. She's also hardly a focus of The Walking Dead anymore, despite being the widow of the man Negan murdered and essentially the one person who should be at the very center of this story now. She's lost her father, her sister and her husband but the show has done next to nothing to show how this has impacted and changed her.
In other words, The Walking Dead has so completely dropped the ball with Maggie that at this point that she's more of a distraction than anything. Mostly we just wonder how she isn't showing any signs of her pregnancy (and why she's magically healthy now despite never seeing a doctor.) Her time is wasted on boring interactions with other characters the show would be better off without like Jesus and Gregory. Indeed, ever since Maggie split with the main group and took up residence at Hilltop, she's been a pointless character in a pointless settlement surrounded by equally pointless and forgettable characters engaging in pointless conversations. If AMC wiped that entire group off the show tomorrow, the show wouldn't suffer one iota. (Though I'd rather see the Trash People exterminated and Negan along with them.)
And while I also think this would be a good move for Cohan---it's generally a good career move to leave The Walking Dead and go do other shows and movies---I'm also not going to lay the entirety of the blame on AMC and the show's producers. Cohan has a really nice British/American accent when you hear her speaking off the show. She was born in the US to an American father and Scottish mother, but moved to England when she was 13. Her accent is a hybrid American/British accent that's very nice to listen to.
Here she is with Steven Yeun (Glenn) speaking with Larry King:
It really makes me wish that Maggie had been a British ex-pat rather than a southerner in The Walking Dead, because Cohan's accent in the above video is as lovely as she is---but her accent on The Walking Dead is not. It's far too thick. It doesn't sound realistic. And she's not alone in this.
I've grown increasingly annoyed by several of the actors' fake southern accents over time. Andrew Lincoln (Rick Grimes) is a British actor and his fake southern accent grows thicker and less believable by the season (though maybe it's just that the dialogue that's gotten worse so I notice it more.) Tom Payne, the British actor who plays Jesus in the show, always sounds incredibly weird and stilted to me in The Walking Dead, but never when I hear him doing interviews in his natural accent. Even Lennie James (Morgan) yet another British actor on the show whose accent is actually pretty good, can start to wear on me with his drawl. Meanwhile, Melissa McBride (Carol) is actually from Kentucky and her accent is much less pronounced than Lincoln's or Cohan's.
Maybe this is a pet peeve of mine and maybe it's silly, but we listen to these characters talk a lot and the fake southern accents are really starting to test my patience. Bad accents on top of bad writing is like fingernails on a chalkboard. So letting Cohan go do something where she's not tied to a thick southern accent, atrocious dialogue and all the myriad other shortcomings that bog down The Walking Dead is probably the best possible outcome. She's been around since Season 2, and that's honestly long enough for any actor on any TV show, especially if fun new projects open up.
I look at Jon Bernthal (Shane) who's gone on to play roles in excellent films like Sicario and Wind River and star in Netflix's Punisher, or Sonequa Martin-Green (Sasha) and her role in the far superior Star Trek: Discovery where she's given an actual character with a background, love interests, personal struggles and all the rest, and I think: "This is what Andrew Lincoln and Lauren Cohan and all these other veterans of The Walking Dead need to do for their careers." I'm sure they could all make more money and act in more satisfying roles on other projects. I'm hoping that's what Chandler Riggs will find after he leaves the show as well (assuming Carl does, in fact, die in the upcoming midseason premiere.)
Naturally, losing all its main characters would test The Walking Dead's staying power. It certainly would make sense for the producers to start developing new characters that we actually care about (as opposed to characters like Enid. Actually, I want Simon (Steven Ogg) to become the new main character, but that's a story for another time.)
Regardless, a show that's gone on this long either needs to commit to some kind of resolution or needs to follow new characters' journeys. We can't keep watching the same characters go through the same cyclical character arcs over and over again against similar antagonists in the same, drab scenery. More than anything, The Walking Dead needs change. It needs to be shaken up. Cohan's departure (if she does in fact leave) is just one piece of that puzzle. I wish her all the best in her new role where hopefully she's put to better use than what she's been given to work with in The Walking Dead. And a better salary, too.
Read Paul Tassi's take on Cohan's potential departure here.
