Zombies on television. Obviously, the first thought for almost everyone is The Walking Dead, unless you’re talking about some of the progressive, more Zombie Tolerant shows from our friends in the UK.

The second thought for many will likely be Walking Dead’s spinoff/prequel, aptly named ‘Fear the Walking Dead’, which debuts this fall.

But there has been at least one other major cable Zombie show in the United States, from Syfy monster movie makers The Asylum, entitled ‘Z Nation’.

Z Nation is ostensibly about transporting the One Immune Human across a Zombie Infested Nation (hence the title) to mass produce a… well, not a cure, more like an Anti-Zombie vaccine.

Obviously not a Zombie Friendly concept. I mean, really. A vaccine against Undeath? Count us out at The Zombie Rights Campaign.

Still, the show grows beyond that premise, if slightly. Zombies start to seem a little less hostile, and the Living display a level of cohesion and reasonableness that is sorely lacking in, say, the Walking-Dead-o-verse. Meanwhile the communities of Living survivors across America range from crazy cults to lunatic ex-military holdouts to ordinary people trying to stay alive, even if they fail to recognize their Undead neighbors, for the moment, as fellow citizens.

There’s also a fair amount of biting social commentary in the show, and the characters, at least some of them, develop in promising, potentially Zombie-accepting ways.

Others, tragically, do not. One case in point is ’10K’, a particularly disturbed young sniper who has literally defined his entire existence around a goal of, err, re-killing 10,000 Undead Americans.

And then there’s Murphy, the One Immune Human. Well… it’s not much of a spoiler to suggest that his immunity is a bit negotiable, and his personal journey toward accepting at least a degree of Zombiism himself is a key piece of the show, not to get TOO spoilery.

The ZRC feels for those who are neither Living nor quite Undead. It’s a difficult place to be.

Still, on the whole, Z Nation is not kind to the Zombies, in spite of Murphy’s Undead evolution. Not kind at all. We rate it as Anti-Zombie.

Tags: ZRC Reviews

This entry was posted by John Sears on Thursday, July 23rd, 2015 at 6:14 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.