American media-services provider, Netflix has yesterday April 11, 2019, premiered season one of zombie drama series Black Summer.
Black Summer is supposedly a prequel to Z Nation, Syfy’s answer to The Walking Dead that was cancelled recently after five seasons.
The show is set at the onset of the zombie apocalypse; Z Nation took place three years into the apocalypse.
Cast
Black Summer season one stars Jaime King as Rose, a mother separated from her daughter during the earliest and most deadly days of a zombie apocalypse while attempting to seek shelter with the military. Things go horribly wrong for her, her child, and her husband in the blink of an eye, leaving Rose to fend for herself and, eventually, place her trust in a stranger, Spears (Justin Chu Cary), a man with plenty to hide.
Though King is the biggest star attached to the series, Rose is part of a much larger ensemble and her story is but one piece of a multi-pronged narrative in which smaller stories intersect with or overlap one another in ways that gives the audience a comprehensive view of a town (and, presumably, society as a whole) collapsing as a result of a terrifying outbreak.
Black Summer Episodes
The pilot episode spends nearly 60 full minutes introducing the main cast of characters, a random selection of frightened, mostly suburban dwellers with little or no training to survive the situation in which they find themselves. The hour is comprised of a series of short segments, each devoted to a particular character, beginning with Rose. From there, the hour introduces Spears, Lance (Kelsey Flower), Kyungson (Christine Lee), Barbara (Gwynyth Walsh), and many more.
The second episode features a lengthy sequence in which a trio of survivors in a minivan are pursued through the streets of a suburban neighbourhood by a black pickup truck (pro tip: pickup trucks in these situations are almost always shorthand for aggressive a**holes looking for a fight). The confrontation goes on much longer than expected, and is told exclusively from the point of view of the three frightened individuals in the minivan.
The distance the show takes from the perpetrators in question gives them an almost inhuman quality, one that exacerbates the tension of the road battle and underlines the rapid decline of civilization. But it also sheds too little light on the characters the audience is expected to form an emotional connection with. The outcome of the suburban Mad Max showdown makes it clear that Black Summer fully buys into the idea that in order for a zombie story have stakes (you know, beyond the whole end of the world thing) any character must be able to die at any time. This is, again, a common trope among such shows, and while it keeps the audience on their toes, it underlines the degree to which every character introduced is really just fodder for the narrative’s bloody, gaping maw.
Nevertheless, Black Summer succeeds in delivering a relentlessly paced zombie drama that never stays in one place long enough for things to get stale. That’s helped by the fact that the season is only eight episodes, which is probably longer than it needs to be, but still doesn’t feel like its overstaying its welcome. For those who still can’t get enough of zombie outbreaks, Black Summer will be a fulfilling binge.
Watch the trailer below:
