Z Nation: More Walking Dead Have Taken Over TV

Television can’t get enough of mouldering corpses – and, no, that isn’t a quip about the composition of the average panel on Tonight With Vincent Browne. Over the past several years, the schedules have become crowded with groaning monstrosities spouting gibberish (nope, still not talking about Vincent Browne). Obviously there is The Walking Dead, the most successful cable TV property ever – bigger than Game Of Thrones, bigger than The Sopranos, far, far bigger than Mad Men.

But AMC’s smash adaptation of the popular graphic novel is just the beginning. This month, the new zombie romp Z Nation debuts on Irish digital televi- sion. Already a cult sensation in the US, it offers a more light-hearted take on the genre, with frequent flourishes of humour and a fast-moving plot that contrasts with the air of mordant doom that can seem to suffuse Walking Dead. It’s a lark – not a brooding meditation on the fall of humanity.
For the artier viewer there is also The Returned, in both its original French and Netflix remake incarnations. Here, the zombies are not drooling mounds of putrescence eager to chomp on your grey matter (unlike The Walking Dead, or canvassing TDs). Instead, they are existentially woebegone and seemingly unchanged since the moment of their death. Being French they're also a bit morose and would rather sit around drinking wine and pondering the meaning of life than running amok in your city centre. A surprise hit two years ago, the French series returns this autumn – while the Netflix remake can be enjoyed right now.
Plus at Comic-Con this month a television reboot of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead was announced, in which Bruce Campbell will reprise his turn as hammy anti-hero Ash. Judging by the trailers, in Ash v The Evil Dead subtlety will fly out the window, an important reminder that zombies can be fun as well as a stand- in for our deepest terrors.
What unites all these properties is that they have been embraced by audiences – thus confirming that the zombie can go where most horror staples fear to tread by successfully transitioning from the big to small screen. That’s more than can be said of the vampire and werewolf, which have generally underwhelmed when transported to TV (a notable exception was the fang-tastic True Blood – no matter that, in its later seasons, it too lost its way).
In movies, of course, zombies are an institution. Beginning with George R Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead (1968), the zombie occupies a cherished place in the horror pantheon. We’ve had the terrify- ing-ooze-of-humanity zombs of Romero’s Dead trilogy; the fast-moving quasi-corpses of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later; and the CGI hordes that provided Brad Pitt with an excuse to save the world in World War Z. What is it about zombies that, figuratively speaking, gets our motors running? Firstly, they’re straight up terrifying – especially if, like this author, you have a deep-seated dread of crowds. Havingonce been caught in a ghastly Hillsbor- ough-style crush exiting Croke Park as a kid in the late ’80s, the sensation of strangers pressing in from all around has long disturbed me – thus zombie movies are all my worst nightmares made (rotting) flesh.
Also, they are the greatest metaphor ever for the helplessness of the individual in the face of insurmountable odds. One-to-one we may be resourceful and brave – but what is the use of girding your loins when confronted by forces beyond the comprehension of a single individual? Zombies on television and in the movies teach us that there are limits to human endeavour – that sometimes it’s smarter to turn tail and run.
“I think we instinctively want to explore the apocalypse when we see what we think is the system breaking down,” said Max Brooks, author of the original World War Z. “And I think the 1970s was exactly like the time we’re living in now. People had a sense that things weren’t working.
“It’s human nature to look ahead, but it’s also human nature to turn away if it’s a little too real. So, you put a little science fiction on there, you make the catalyst fake... say, zombies... and then you can watch the apocalypse.”
In the case of the forthcoming Z Nation, the goal was to bring the zombie experience to the small screen without coming across as off-puttingly doomy or po-faced. In other words, to provide the viewer with undead thrills while avoiding the portentous melodrama of The Walking Dead.
“There is obviously a great zombie show already on, in The Walking Dead, so our mission is to go where they don’t,” Z Nation showrunner Karl Schaefer said recently. “The biggest difference between us and them is that our series has a sense of hope and also a sense of humour. We’re trying to put the fun back into zombies.”
But the biggest surprise about Z Nation isn’t that it bears so little resemblance to The Walking Dead. It’s that it originates with The Asylum, the notorious Hollywood studio synonymous with schlock epics such as Sharknado and MegaShark V Giant Octopus (as well as with ‘mockbusters’ such as Transmorphers).
“When I first came to this project with The Asylum, one of the things we all agreed on, right upfront, was that this would not be a campy mockbuster like Sharknado, or some of the other projects that they do,” says Schaefer. “We wanted to make a real show. There’s black humour in the most serious of moments, and the humour in the show is all character-based. It’s more like M.A.S.H. than it is like Sharknado. The Walking Dead is taking a very realistic, straightforward look at things. And they won’t call them zombies. They’ll call them anything in the world, but zombies. With our show, we wanted to put it in a uni- verse where people know about zombies. They’ve seen zombie movies. They’ve seen Night Of The Living Dead. We have all kinds of zombies. We wanted to be the zombie show that says, ‘Yes, we’ll do that kind of zombie.’ We have fast zombies, slow zombies and animal zombies. We had a zombie bear. We have zombie babies.” With a pitch like that, who could resist?