George A. Romero’s classic Dead films may have sparked an explosion of zombie media, but it took quite a while for these undead ghouls to invade television screens. Unlike ghosts, werewolves and vampires, which benefited from popular shows like Dark Shadows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural, shambling corpses were usually left out of prime-time programming. While this changed with the success of AMC’s adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, that doesn’t mean zombies were always absent from the small screen. That’s why I’d like to explore the inevitable rise of “Z-TV” and why we still love it.
For the purposes of this article, we’ll only be considering “modern” undead zombies, as the voodoo-inspired drones of early horror have little in common with the cannibalistic monsters that we know and love. We’re also excluding ghostly/phantasmagorical depictions of the undead, as that would be stretching the definition of “zombie” a little too thin.
In any case, the earliest instance of something resembling modern zombies on television arguably occurred in 1964, predating Romero’s iconic take on flesh-eating ghouls by four years! In Twilight Zone‘s Mr. Garrity and the Graves, Rod Serling introduced audiences to the supposedly true story of an old-west conman who convinced the residents of a small town that he could raise the dead. While it mostly focuses on the social consequences of having deceased citizens come back to life, the episode ends with the disgruntled corpses of the town of Happiness rising from their graves, hell-bent on getting even with the living.
The haunting image of an empty cemetery makes for one hell of a final shot, but these re-animated revenants aren’t exactly the traditional undead monsters that we’re used to. It was only in the 90s that TV would really start to play around with genre storytelling, with media juggernauts like The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer finally bringing creatures like aliens and demons to the small screen. Even then, there were still very few zombie-specific stories, though we saw a handful of memorable ones.
A little chattier than your average corpse.
Buffy had a particularly fun zombie episode in season 3’s Dead Man’s Party, where a macabre Nigerian mask begins to reanimate the deceased residents of Sunnydale, resulting in undead party-crashers at Buffy’s welcome-back celebration. That same season would also tackle re-animated corpses in The Zeppo, with Xander befriending a rabble-rousing group of undead high-schoolers in an attempt to look “cool”.
Curiously, the 7th season of The X-Files was originally meant to feature a story inspired by Night of the Living Dead, with a script written by Stephen King and the episode allegedly being directed by George Romero himself. Though the idea was ultimately scrapped, zombies would still make their way into the show’s canon through a crossover episode with Millennium, which also served as an abrupt series finale for Chris Carter’s underrated spin-off. Mulder and Scully teaming up with Lance Henriksen’s Frank Black in a battle against cannibalistic ghouls may not have been the kind of closure that Millennium fans were looking for, but it still made for a fun episode with plenty of references to Romero’s classic.
In the animated world, The Simpsons first encountered zombies in the Z For Zombies segment of the third Treehouse of Horror special, which features Bart unleashing an undead apocalypse after attempting to revive the family’s recently deceased cat, Pet-Sematary-style. We’d also see special zombie-themed episodes in other animated shows, with everything from South Park‘s classic Pinkeye to Animaniacs‘ Night of the Living Buttons poking fun at the sub-genre.
In one of my personal favorite examples of televised zombies, the third episode of Edgar Wright’s Spaced features Simon Pegg fighting off imaginary ghouls after playing Resident Evil 2 while high on drugs. Not only is this a hilarious episode of an excellent series, but it’s also the inspiration behind Wright and Pegg’s Shaun of the Dead, making it a horror-comedy landmark.
From Supernatural‘s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid to Community‘s infamous Halloween special Epidemiology, the 2000s would continue the paranormal trend on television, allowing for more special zombie episodes even in non-horror programming. However, the zombies of this decade would be more influenced by films like 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake instead of old-fashioned horror flicks, playing up the contagion and body-horror aspects of the undead menace.
Zombies for the Reality TV generation.
It was only in 2008 that we’d also see the first entirely zombie-themed program with Charlie Brooker’s Dead Set miniseries, a reality TV parody where Big Brother contestants find themselves in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Not only was the show a massive hit, inspiring quarantine challenges in the real Big Brother and an eventual Brazilian remake on Netflix, but it also paved the way for the horror show that was about to change everything.
Two years later, the zombie renaissance was about to begin with the release of Frank Darabont’s adaptation of The Walking Dead. Originally formatted like a six-episode miniseries, the show’s first season was absolutely revolutionary, once again turning zombies into a credible threat and making a strong case for serialized horror storytelling in general. Even if you’re not a fan of the show’s later seasons, there’s no denying its lasting influence on the horror genre.
Over the past decade, the series’ long-running success has led to a plethora of shows featuring re-animated flesh-eaters. From Death Valley to iZombie, Ash vs. Evil Dead and even spin-offs like Fear the Walking Dead and Z-Nation‘s underrated Black Summer, I think it’s safe to say that zombies have completely infected mainstream programming. The genre has become so popular that it’s now common to see subversive and even satirical takes on its many tropes, reinventing the classic zombie for new audiences.
With The Walking Dead still airing its 11th and final season and streaming services like Netflix working on several new zombie shows (not to mention additional seasons for their existing ones), the undead menace is more popular than ever. Maybe it’s because we like to imagine how we’d react when faced with a deadly apocalypse, or maybe we just enjoy watching flesh-eating shenanigans on the small screen, but the fact is that Z-TV is here to stay. And I can’t wait to see where televised zombies go next.
