The Walking Dead: How Negan Became A Fan-Favorite (His Timeline Explained)

Though some may find him irredeemable, there is no doubt that Negan became a favorite character amongst The Walking Dead fandom. Introduced in The Walking Dead season 6, Negan was nothing more than a sadistic bat-wielding antagonist, but over time, Negan slowly evolved from a total TWD villain into somewhat of an antihero with redeeming qualities. Many of his past sins are unforgivable, but that hasn’t stopped viewers from being highly invested in this intriguing character.

With the help of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s superb performance, Negan breathed new life into The Walking Dead, and became popular enough to get his own spinoff - The Walking Dead: Dead City. Premiering in 2023, this TWD spinoff takes place long after the events of the original show, and follows Negan and Maggie as they search post-apocalyptic Manhattan looking for her missing son. With The Walking Dead: Dead City season 2 arriving in 2025, it's clear that the franchise thinks that the best of Negan is yet to come. He's certainly had a fascinating character arc thus far.

Negan's Timeline On The Walking Dead Explained

He Has A (Somewhat) Sympathetic Backstory

Negan’s Origin Revealed

The season 10 finale, “Here’s Negan,” finally let audiences dive deeper into Negan’s TWD backstory. Before the zombie outbreak, Negan was a high school gym teacher married to a woman named Lucille. After being fired due to his anger issues, Negan resorted to drinking heavily, which led to a bar fight in which he almost killed someone. He also began an affair with another woman.

Sometime later, Lucille was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Negan then devoted his time to helping her get well, but the outbreak made things even more difficult. Unable to get the medicine she needed, Lucille died, and Negan lost the last bit of humanity he had left. He would go on to find the Saviors, deposing their leader and taking his place on the throne.

The Leader of the Saviors

Introduced at the end of season 6 of The Walking Dead, Negan Smith quickly established himself as the most fearsome enemy that the heroes had ever come across up to that point. With his trusty barbed-wire bat (affectionately named Lucille), Negan was quick to lay down the law with the bat by brutally murdering Abraham Ford, and then Glenn Rhee in front of his friends and his girlfriend, Maggie Greene. From then on, he continued terrorizing Rick and the group with his sadistic methods of torture, claiming protection against the walkers in exchange for contributing supplies.

Negan Finds His Humanity

After a long period of Negan terrorizing the group, Rick and the other surviving communities finally stepped up and declared war on the Saviors. Both sides suffered heavy losses, and yet neither Negan nor Rick were willing to back down. Despite his ruthless tactics, Negan did begin to show a more human side throughout the ordeal. Through his tense conversation with Father Gabriel, he revealed the tragic story of his wife. Negan also appeared remorseful upon hearing of Carl’s death, whom he had come to admire.

Negan The Prisoner

With the war finally coming to an end in Rick’s favor, Negan was locked up rather than killed. During his imprisonment, Rick’s daughter Judith started to bring out the good in Negan, as she regularly visited him in his cell. After saving Judith’s life during a blizzard, Negan began to earn the group’s trust, and was allowed out of his cell with supervision.

Negan Infiltrates The Whisperers

In The Walking Dead season 10, Negan walked willingly into the Whisperers’ territory and offered to join them. After a series of grueling tests, Alpha welcomed him into the fold. After the Whisperers and their hoard attacked Hilltop, Negan revealed his hand by killing Alpha after he led her into a trap, then offered her head to Carol. It turns out that Carol and Negan were working together to take down Alpha all along, in exchange for amnesty for Negan’s past crimes. Demonstrating once more that Negan has learned to sympathize, he comforted Lydia, Alpha’s daughter, following the leader’s death.

Negan Proves His Worth

In The Walking Dead’s final season, Negan was finally brought into the fold at Alexandria. Although he proved himself to be invaluable against both the walkers and the Reapers as they traveled through Meridian, Maggie still could not bring herself to forgive him for his previous sins, and Negan decided to leave the group.

When next we see Negan, he is married to a woman named Annie, and the two have made a happy life together. When Negan learned that Maggie’s group was in danger at the Complex, he didn't hesitate to come to their rescue. Negan made it clear that he was a changed man, completely devoting himself to his wife and unborn child while helping the survivors fight the Commonwealth.

Negan Heads To New York

In The Walking Dead: Dead City season 1, Negan takes the center stage alongside Maggie, this time navigating the grim ruins of post-apocalyptic Manhattan. Years after the events of The Walking Dead, Negan is pulled back into the spotlight when Maggie seeks his help to rescue her kidnapped son, Hershel. The boy has been taken by a formidable new antagonist known as The Croat, a former Savior with ties to Negan’s brutal past.

Reluctantly teaming up with Maggie, Negan ventures into the walker-infested city, where the undead aren’t the only threat. With towering skyscrapers, severed skybridges, and violent factions controlling the boroughs, New York offers a fresh kind of chaos. As Negan confronts his old sins and a society teetering on the edge, Dead City places the character in a setting that’s as unforgiving as he is, forcing him to evolve once again - this time under the shadow of everything he's done.

Negan Was The Worst Villain On The Walking Dead

He Was The Most Sadistic & Only Changed His Ways For Selfish Purposes

The Walking Dead has had its share of despicable villains over its 11-season run. As if the walkers weren’t bad enough, Rick and the other survivors had to contend with the likes of people like Merle Dixon, the Governor, and Pamela Milton. Yet as bad as they all were, none of them can compare to the evil that is Negan Smith.

Even though he found his way in the end, Negan earns the honor of being the most vicious and nefarious villain in The Walking Dead. Each act of violence and torture he committed was done with a grin on his face and without mercy. He only started to do the right thing when it became about his own survival. Negan may have changed his colors by the end of The Walking Dead, but like Maggie, fans still remember how he brutally killed Glenn, and psychologically tortured many others, making him impossible to be fully forgiven.

How Fans Fell In Love With Hating Negan

Jeffrey Dean Morgan Gave The TWD Villain Charm To Burn

Even years after the finale of The Walking Dead, most fans still agree that Negan was the best-worst villain of the series. In one reddit post from _ChineseName, titled “Negan is one of the best characters in the history of television,” the user claims: “As a fan base, we’ve never despised a character more than we did to Negan for all of seasons 7 and 8, yet somehow, as the show progresses, we actually start showing sympathy for the man.”

It seems that Negan’s charisma also had a lot to do with him being a fan favorite. Reddit user SuperToxin wrote in another post: “He’s charismatic villain, he is funny cracks jokes and heads. He’s brutal and monstrous.” Several other users in the same post seemed to agree, citing Negan’s humor and charm as being a likable trait despite his brutality.

According to Business Insider, actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan claimed that he still gets flack for Negan killing off Glenn in The Walking Dead. “It changed my life,” Morgan told the audience at the Television Critics Association winter press tour panel in 2023. “That one scene changed my life, literally, in so many ways. And I still get s*** for it. I live in New York and so I walk down those streets, and the people that are there remind me daily that Glenn was their favorite character."

What's Next For Negan?

Dead City Season 2 Promises Even More Danger

With The Walking Dead: Dead City season 2 here in May 2025, the next chapter of Negan’s story is poised to push him into his most morally complicated space yet. Dead City season 1 ends with a massive status quo shift: Maggie rescues Hershel, but not without cost. Negan, in a sacrifice of sorts, willingly surrenders himself to The Dama, a mysterious and ruthless figure in control of one of Manhattan’s major territories. It's a calculated move to protect Maggie and her son - one that echoes Negan’s recurring theme of redemption through punishment.

Heading into Dead City season 2, fans can expect Negan to walk a razor-thin line between survival and submission. The Dama doesn’t see him as just a tool, she wants to mold him into a leader for her own ends, seeing his violent charisma as an asset. That dynamic sets the stage for a new version of Negan: one who may be forced to resurrect the darker parts of himself just to navigate this hostile world. But is that evolution, regression, or something in between?

Meanwhile, Maggie’s arc is likely far from done. Her distrust of Negan remains palpable, and the guilt of involving him in yet another moral quagmire could lead her back into conflict with him. The uneasy bond Negan and Maggie formed in Dead City season 1 might be tested further, especially if Negan’s actions under The Dama’s rule become ethically murky.

Season 2 is also expected to expand the world of Dead City, diving deeper into the fractured, faction-driven power structure of post-apocalyptic Manhattan. With Negan at the heart of it, audiences could see a power struggle unfold that mirrors his past rise - and fall - with the Saviors. If the show leans into that parallel, it could pose a compelling question: Is Negan destined to become the tyrant he once was, or can he finally break the cycle?

In true Walking Dead fashion, the line between villain and hero will blur. And with Jeffrey Dean Morgan continuing to deliver one of the franchise’s most layered performances, Dead City season 2 could be the moment that defines who Negan really is - once and for all.