For all you zombie show lovers, we’ve got another one on the books. But is it worth watching? In my honest opinion, ‘meh, not really’. It follows what I like to call, “the modern” style of zombie films where it’s more than people trying to survive a zombie outbreak, and people trying to survive against other people as well (“the classic,” as I like to call it, is where people just have to survive against zombies/undead – think REC, Resident Evil, Night of the Living Dead, etc).
Black Summer, co-created by Karl Schaefer and John Hyams, is an 8 episode spin-off series off of the popular Z Nation. If you’ve never watched Z Nation, and that’s what’s stopping you from watching this series, good news: you don’t have to know anything at all about the original series to get anything out of Black Summer. The bad news is that it parallels The Walking Dead’s spin-off series, Fear the Walking Dead. I mean that in the sense where (for the most part) The Walking Dead was this awesome series and Fear the Walking Dead was this… disappointment. I know Fear the Walking Dead picks up the more you watch, but I do not want to watch hours worth of a show just to wait for it to get better.
The cool thing about this show is that it skips around telling different people’s stories in one episode. You’ll get to see how a situation arose from the ground up rather than being surprised by random occurrences with no explanation.
Pros:
- It’s very action heavy
- Has a diverse cast where not everyone could be from the same place and have the same background [Yo, there are two leading actors who are Asian, shout out to Christine Lee and Justin Chu Cary]
- Adds to Z Nation’s world
- It’s another zombie show!
- Lots of people die!!!
Cons:
- Acting is kind of off in the beginning (but what actors feel perfect in the beginning)
- It’s another zombie show in a world saturated with zombie shows…
- Lots of people die…
- You forget the main point of the show pretty quickly and often, unlike in Season 1 of Z Nation
In conclusion: 6/10
