SYFY’s revamp of Romero’s zombie classic adds little to the overcrowded corner of horror and loses itself in generic melodrama and scares.
Do we need another zombie television show?
That’s the question that’s inherently on everyone’s minds when they even hear about a new zombie television series that pulls from George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead. What can it possibly do or say that hasn’t already been exhausted in Black Summer, Z Nation, iZombie, Santa Clarita Diet, last year’s COVID-inspired The Bite, or the hundreds of episodes of content that exist within the still-growing Walking Dead connected universe?
The amount of horror that’s taken a bite out of this undead archetype has become as plentiful as a horde of zombies. This doesn’t mean that this material should be off the table, but it just makes it increasingly important to have a unique perspective and do something different with zombies. To be clear, it’s absolutely fine to just be an entertaining zombie series that’s high in the body count, heavy in the gore, and not interested in being anything deeper, but it still needs to work and have a point of view. Romero’s original films had a natural social commentary subtext built into them. Not everything needs to be multi-layered high art, but in a genre that’s over-bloated in both television and film it’s imperative for Day of the Dead to not just become yet another zombie show. Day of the Dead is busy and bloody, but it struggles to find a distinct voice among the sea of undead groans.
Day of the Dead’s depiction of the start of a zombie outbreak in small-town Mawinhaken focuses on six strangers who are united through this disaster and right from the in media res introduction the series telegraphs that it’s not interested in breaking fresh ground with its zombies. Both the Bowmans and McDermotts are classically frayed families whose stresses get accelerated through this terrible apocalyptic tragedy, yet it manages to unite them and leave them off stronger than ever before. Day of the Dead often gets a little too invested in the teen melodrama and angst, which reduces this material to more disposable content that feels juvenile and driven by adolescent impulses. Episodes get lost in unnecessary, ancillary plotting like shotgun weddings and disapproving parents, stealing a keg for a party, local elections, and pressure to lose virginity. It doesn’t feel like any of this will satisfy adults, and while it might please some of the teen demographic, there’s also more thoughtful, better looking versions of the same ideas that are available in Daybreak or The Walking Dead: World Beyond.
DAY OF THE DEAD — Episode 101 — Pictured: (l-r) Daniel Doheny as Luke Bowman, Keenan Tracey as Cam McDermott — (Photo by: DOTD S1 Productions/SYFY)
SYFY’s Day of the Dead is frequently at its strongest when it allows the community to band together and function as a team, but it still has difficulty with creating interesting characters. Sincere moments will occur, but every scenario is just so inherently artificial. The storylines that Day of the Dead decides to devote its attention towards are so confusing and tonally inconsistent. Episodes will verge into slapstick-esque comedy at a moment’s notice and some characters function entirely as black holes of awkward humor. There’s also a heavy-handed shadow organization, Cleargenix Energy, that functions as a constant reminder that corporations can be even more evil than zombies.
The whole small community versus “The Man” angle isn’t out of place, but a condemnation of fracking doesn’t strengthen the message in Day of the Dead, either. At one point it incorporates Indigenous People into the zombie narrative as it digs into the reclamation of land, which scratches at the surface of something compelling, but it quickly recedes into the background in favor of bloodier fare. The rote mayoral candidate angle feels equally extraneous and is more effectively handled in something like The Purge. In fact, the level of social and environmental awareness in Day of the Dead reads more like The Toxic Avenger rather than the biting indictment of society that was naturally achieved in Romero’s original films.
There’s a lot to gripe over in Day of the Dead, but it’s at least a series that contains some decent gore. Each episode contains plenty of action and deaths of both the human and zombie persuasion. There’s a sequence at a morgue with trembling meat locker drawers that’s well conceived and a siege at a retirement home that attempts something different for the genre. There are also some probing questions about the nature of how zombies are able to stay “alive” for hundreds of years and the science behind them, but also how to weaponize this knowledge to create zombie warriors. However, none of these ideas take enough risks in the end. Maintaining the blue zombie aesthetic from the original movie, while silly-looking, would at least give Day of the Dead a different look from every other zombie show that’s been on TV for the past decade. These undead threats look like they’re straight out of The Walking Dead and just because this style worked for them doesn’t mean that it’s the best design here.
The second half of the season inexplicably becomes more of a Dawn of the Dead remake as the cast takes refuge in a shopping center-like fortress. As other zombie series have frequently indicated, holing up in one place for an extended period of time usually doesn’t help the show’s narrative and typically slows things down. It’s these types of decisions that make it feel like Day of the Dead would have benefitted as a six-episode miniseries or SYFY Original movie. Ten episodes is too much time to spend on this repetitive material.
This first season does look towards the future and teases a second season with more evolved zombies, as well as grander problems and conspiracies, but not enough viewers may make it to the season’s conclusion to anticipate what’s on the horizon. There’s the potential to do something more ambitious here based on the questions that the series begins to explore in the season’s concluding installments. Hopefully Day of the Dead can defy expectations and use this freshman season to learn from its mistakes and create something more challenging, Otherwise, Day of the Dead is doomed to remain serviceable zombie fodder that blends in with the horde of undead programming that’s shambled onto television throughout the past decade.
Season one of ‘Day of the Dead’ premieres October 15th at 10pm on SYFY.
