3 out of 5

Developed by: Josh Applebaum, André Nemec, Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg

covers season 1

Zoo is a dumb show done well, something that manages to whittle your suspicions that it’s taking itself too seriously down to guarded entertainment, then, somehow – riding on the back of a continually moving plot, and a batch of relatively faceless but likeable characters – tossing kindling your way to build up a little fire of support, all while still maintaining its straight faced treatment of its ideas.  This kind of inertia approach won’t work for everything, of course, but Zoo seems to have found the high-wire balanced over the right elements and the skills to traverse it to make it work.

The animals are rebelling.  That’s really all you need to know.  Zoo twiddles in science and conspiracy to explain this but doesn’t harp on it too much; it even trots out a “cure” pretty early on, giving our assembled leads – a Justice League of random specialists and, inevitably, a wildcard who stumbles into the mix – a MacGuffin to chase while baboons and rats and tigers are chasing them.  That’s not to say the writers take it easy in the plotting department: it never feels like we’re coasting, it’s rather that it seems agreed that no matter how this was explained there would be big gaps, and so it’s more entertaining just to sort of nod to the plotty elephant in the room (hyuck), accept that we fully appreciate the gist, and move on.  Because like classic monster movies of yore, “nature attacks” is one of those primal fears that we can mostly agree on and access, and that it can be easily updated to include “we’re killing the planet”isms – and supported by surprisingly good special effects and blocking – means now’s a good a time as any to trot this particular trope back out.  Same goes for our cast, who are all supremely well chosen for their particular cynical / reckless / stoic contributions, and who are all equally key to selling the material to us.

And that’s really all there is to it.  Our troupe gets chased by one particular animal or another, chasing after or protecting their cure and facing as many roadblocks as possible along the way.  But they’re convincing roadblocks, within the logic of Zoo, because animals, man, they’re everywhere, and they sure can stir up some shit if they want to.  The season ender kind of hilariously solves everything and blows it up at the same time, so things could successfully halt here if someone decides to preserve this little gem of A-level B-TV goodness, but it would be pretty cool to see – like Z Nation, another ya’d-think-it’s-a-stinker-but-it-turned-out-pretty-great show – if they could keep things going or even improve for a second run.