5 out of 5

Created by: Burnie Burns, Matt Hullum

covers season 1

There are plenty of content providers nowadays, but while some have stepped up their game – I used to associate USA with, like, Silk Stalkings, for example, but now there’s Mr. Robot – and most manage competent if not impressive production values, certain generalisms can still be made about, say, what HBO programming or Netflix programming tends to be.  And so Rooster Teeth, known as a haven for comedic web shorts, can logically give me pause as a source for serious hour-long dramas.  And I held on to that hesitation for a couple of episodes of Day 5: Nodding in expectation of what seemed to be the beginning stages of stoner comedy; to an early dose of frat-boy girl nudity; to the slightly dodgy make-up and acting; waiting for the premise to betray a simplistic core.

Only… it wasn’t quite comedy, or played expressly with that tone.  And the nudity actually ended up getting underplayed in a fashion contradictory to the setup.  And the acting earns its place as we get more comfortable with these characters… and maybe the makeup isn’t dodgy but just looks uncomfortable in the sense that these people look as out of sorts as they’re supposed to.  And the plot…  ‘What Happened?’ setups will forever be difficult to craft satisfyingly.  The greatest twist in the world can flop if you don’t pace the reveal correctly, and if you take the backroad exit of trying to say it doesn’t matter in order to focus on, like, character, well, you’d better make sure your characters are actually interesting ahem ahem Walking Dead.

The What in Day 5 is a sudden (seemingly) world-spanning infection that takes you right to death the moment you go to sleep.  Everyone that was already conked out at around 3am on that fateful day: Gone.  And anyone without the fortitude to keep themselves jacked awake to drift off but for a second suffer the same fate.  And the How they handle this What is what kept me from being able to dismiss my initial judgments, or rather kept me around to reconsider them.  This is an immediate epidemic.  As the title suggests, were covering the fifth day of the experience (buffered by some lead-in flashbacks to the various characters who gather together), and most of is have pulled an all-nighter or two to recognize how difficult the following day can be even dosed on infinite caffeine, so extended even further…  It necessarily curtails a lot of the Explanation conversation for a more pressing search for just how to get to Day 6, which, inevitably, ends up revealing bits of answers along the way.  And even then, when the show dips into some familiar pools, it doesn’t stall on dunt-dunt-dunt reveals because the question still has to be: What do we do with this information?  It’s an incredibly organic way to handle matters, and in this same laser-vision fashion, the writers keep us down to a small group – – and don’t bother with the exhausting in-bickering that most of these crisis shows use to fill up runtime.  There are plenty of distractions otherwise, including a few fascinatingly frightening considerations of what sleep exhaustion does to people – which, again, skews the usual “yeah lets rape everybody” horror show these setups normally pitch as edgy.

There are further bits and pieces along the way that keep us this trend of dodging the trend, and each one immerses us even more, fully able to relate to the thoughts and actions expressed or enacted.  It’s as though the premise was actually considered from a human perspective and not a sensational television drama one…  Odd how that works.

The acting can still be a bit wooden and the flashbacks attempts at emotionality a tad forced, but the spirit of things is spot-on, so it’s easy to forgive.  And the scope of the production, while still handled on a small scale, is pretty impressive considering just that.

I’m still okay with judging content providers by their overall output, but Day 5 certainly goes to show: If it sounds interesting, give it some time.  On the off-chance that it’s worth it, occasionally it will be really worth it.