3 out of 5

Created by: Karl Schaefer, Craig Engler

covers season 1

As SyFy began, in earnest, to earn back its TV cred with several new original shows, they went sort of headfirst into melodrama with both Helix and Dominion, but you could tell the desire to do right was there.  So it seemed like the pendulum was just going to swing in the opposite direction when the channel teamed up with mockbuster kings The Asylum to produce a zombie series that would begin airing shortly before that year’s Walking Dead premiere.  This assumption actually wasn’t far off – Z Nation fully embraces B-movie ethics – but the show actually managed to hold its own by working on what turned out to be a pretty compelling ongoing plot and rallying together a likeable cast who are written roundly enough to survive the killing off of some notable names throughout the season.  Basically, the show is the polar opposite of Walking Dead, while staying within the over-gory zombie genre: we call them zombies; we have a sense of humor; we have an actual cause and cure.  In WD, the emphasis is on open-endedness so that we can focus on how the zombie apocalypse affects us; in Z-Nation, the emphasis is on What If? antics like zombie animals and zombie stampedes, which keep us humorously distracted while the crew that we’re following escort Murphy – the only survivor of an experimental cure – to a destination specified by Citizen Z, the only one left at an Antarctic NSA post, who’s got access to the intel needed to mostly guide the team to safety.  The very notion that there’s a goal gives the series momentum, while the writers and effects team find fun ways to create roadblocks on the path and annihilate zombos in increasingly inventively goopy fashions, with functional CGI and gritty cinematography maintaining the mood.  And then some notable plotting surprises come out of the woodwork, twisting things in ridiculous but fantastic ways that we’ll never get to see on the more serious Walking Dead.  So, yes, the show is actually exactly what you’d expect it to be.  However, somehow that turned out a ton better than I could’ve guessed.