SYFY Day of the Dead series

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George A. Romero’s zombie films, starting with Night Of The Living Dead, were as much about how our society has failed than about the undead. The best in the zombie genre, which is currently led by the Walking Dead franchise, often pushes the rambling flesh-eaters into the background to show that “the scariest enemy is us.” So, what does Day Of The Dead, an “homage” to Romero’s 1985 film Day of the Dead, do to not just make the story about zombies? Read on for more.

DAY OF THE DEAD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of the American and Pennsylvanian flags. A newspaper with a headline about the mayoral election in Mawinhaken is on the ground, and a ragged foot shambles over it.

The Gist: Cam McDermott (Keenan Tracey) and Luke Bowman (Daniel Doheny) wake up in a car that’s surrounded by zombies. As they start to get overwhelmed, a hearse barrels through; in it is Luke’s mother, Mayor Paula Bowman (Miranda Frigon) and local funeral home apprentice Lauren Howell (Natalie Malaika). Paula happily blasts a few zombies with two of her many guns; as they start to speed away, Cam notices that one of the zombies is his father.

Flash back to “Earlier”. Cam and his dad (Mike Dopud), a police detective, aren’t getting along, especially since the death of Cam’s mom. He basically works every odd job he can get so that he can save money to leave Mawinhaken and go to college in Hawaii, including maintaining the cemetery grounds outside the funeral home where Lauren works. Lauren, who would rather work with the dead than deal with the living, is nine months sober and on parole, two details her slimy boss mentions when he wants to take her out for a drink. As she prepares the body for her first solo funeral, she notices that the man’s eyes have popped open.

Det. McDermott is called to a fracking site where Sarah Blackwood (Morgan Holmstrom) the “new guy” on the crew, found a mummified body in a pit that was blocking the drill. Her boss is annoyed that she stopped the work by calling on the police, and he succeeds in calling McDermott off the investigation. But McDermott conspires with Sarah to sneak into that hole to see what’s going on.

Luke tries to steal beers for a hangout with his buddies, but Paula catches him while she’s grabbing something from her gun safe. She’s a proponent of open carry laws and she’s bringing her sidearm to an election rally.

Then, almost all at once, the zombies start attacking. The dead guy at the funeral home attacks first, then hands and heads start popping out of the cemetery where Cam is mowing the grass. Cam’s dad gets grabbed by the body in the hole as the fracking drill starts coming down.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Of course, the series Day Of The Dead is an homage to George A. Romero’s movie of the same name, but this series in particular feels like Fear The Walking Dead or Walking Dead: World Beyond, which take place in the early stages of the zombie apocalypse.

Our Take: Taken at face value, there’s nothing about this version of Day Of The Dead, created by Jed Elinoff and Scott Thomas, that distinguishes itself from all of the other zombie shows and movies that have been shambling about our screens for the past decade. We’ve had serious zombie shows, funny zombie shows, shows where the zombies don’t rot and resist the urge to eat live human flesh, shows where the zombies are slow, shows where the zombies are fast.

Day Of The Dead doesn’t really give viewers anything new to get their attention. There are a group of generic small-town characters whose backstories are barely explored before the undead rise and attack. We don’t even get a glimpse of one of the main characters — Amy (Kristy Dawn Dinsmore), the daughter of the town’s doctor — in the first episode, just random scenes with her nervous fiancé on their wedding day.

It’s a bit infuriating to watch, because for all the time that is given to setting up this randomly-starting zombie invasion, we’re given very little information about the people who will try to survive it. For instance, we know that Cam and Luke are pretty much polar opposites and don’t like each other, so seeing them teamed up in the flash-forward scene in the cold open means that whatever history there was between them faded quickly. Cam accidentally smashes Luke’s rear windshield, but nothing comes of it; it seems like it’s just a scene to show Luke’s buddy tripping over fingers that have suddenly popped out of a grave.

Even the zombies are standard-issue stuff we’ve seen on TWD and elsewhere. One of the things we do like is that they’re not all rotted; some of the recently dead just have blood on their faces. We haven’t established the “rules” the living will have to learn in order to fight and kill these undead folks, and that’s always fun to find out. But for the most part, Elinoff and Thomas are paying tribute to the zombie archetype Romero established, which has been copied so many times in the decades since, it now feels like a Xerox of a Xerox.

So, if the zombies are generic and the characters are generic, is the acting at least decent? Employing good actors like Norman Reedus, Jenna Elfman, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Lennie James, Aliyah Royale and many more has helped distinguish the TWD franchise from just being a cheesy zombie show. Here, we get a mixed bag. We liked the performances of Malaika and Frigon, but the rest were flat or, even worse, stiff. Not that we’re looking for Emmy-worthy stuff here, but TWD and other zombie shows have risen the bar from Romero’s early days, and we expect a little bit more than we got.

Sex and Skin: Mayor Bowman’s husband Trey (Christopher Russell) gets some voting-booth nookie from Bowman’s campaign manager Nicole (Caitlin Stryker). Not sure where this story is going to go, or how long either of them will survive.

Parting Shot: Cam, Lauren and the funeral attendees take shelter in the funeral home’s morgue. She tells the group that no one will come in due to the protections, but as the now-undead bodies start busting out of the drawers, Cam goes, “They’re already here.”

Sleeper Star: Natalie Malaika’s character Lauren is the only one with a scintilla of a backstory, and she plays whatever crumbs of character she gets pretty well.

Most Pilot-y Line: As Mayor Bowman guns down some undead, she yells, “How does the second amendment taste, motherfuckers?” Uh, Ms. Mayor, they can’t hear you.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Romero’s zombie movies were as much about societal ills as they were about the undead. This new version of Day Of The Dead tries to mimic that formula, but doesn’t follow through with good enough storylines or characters that we care about.

Will you stream or skip the George A. Romero homage #DayOfTheDead on @SYFY? #SIOSI

— Decider (@decider) October 15, 2021

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

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