Black Summer: How not to do a Zombie show

 

Since becoming a father I have spent a great deal of time doing laps of my living room while rocking the baby for naps and the like.  During that time, since I can't play games quite as much as I'd like, I've been catching up with my watch list on Netflix and Amazon and I've seen some good shit.  Better Call Saul, Peaky Blinders (except season 6 that shit was anus), Everything Everywhere All At Once, Juni Ito: Maniac, all in all it's been a pretty good time.  But then I decided to fire up a zombie series called Black Summer and holy moly, this isn't just the worst thing I've watched while on baby duty, it's maybe one of the worst things I've seen just in general.

First broadcast via Netflix in 2019 and apparently some kind of spinoff of some other crap sounding show called Z Nation, Black Summer follows a bunch of characters as they try to survive their way through a zombie apocolypse in order to get to some kind of sports stadium where apparently it's safe.  I'm currently half way through the first season of the show and it's pissing me off to such a degree that I can't help but come here to complain about it.

The premise is you're average zombie survival affair.  Survivors and zombies and assholes for your standard issue "are you humans the real monsters after all?!" nonsense that comes with most zombie media but that's fine, I was pretty much expecting it to be that way going in.  What I wasn't expecting is for the writing of the show to be THIS fucking horrendous on all fronts.  You could legitimately use this show in a course for aspiring film students on what not to do when making a horror show.

Each episode consists of your standard zombie fare where characters go to a place, get fucked somehow and then try to survive but the problem with Black Summer is that the characters seem to be sometimes just willfully fucking themselves or just opting to be immensely fucking stupid at all times.  For example there's one part where they end up in a school which has been overrun by murderous teenagers.  That setup in itself is kind of stupid but there is a scene where a standoff happens, one guy has a gun train on a group of kids, they have a gun pointed back at them and a hostage.  The hostage in question is deaf so there's a bit of an exchange and they agree to let him go in exchange for their gun.  The leader of the teens passes his gun to a small boy and says "shoot him if he moves" while they make the change but the hostage in question is deaf, so he starts to walk where the small boy just blasts him in the back, killing him.  At this point the boys start to flee and they just let them fucking go.  The characters were going on in the previous episode about how they needed weapons and these kids clearly have weapons and just killed your friend and instead of gunning them down and taking their shit they just let them go.  This is then proceeded by the dumbest zombie chase of all time where characters just opt to leave doors wide open for the rage zombie to chase them through and make the shittest attempts I have ever seen in this type of media to block his path.  These are fast rage zombies by the way and their ability to tank bullets seems to be based on how  "tense" the scene needs to be rather than having any sort of consistent rules. 

Speaking of inconsistent rules, in the same episode there is another character who is running away from a zombie, again in the dumbest way imaginable who has a very clearly fucked up right hand.  It's covered in blood and after escaping the zombie he tries to start a car and has to clumsily reach over to the ignition with his left hand because his right is unusable.  These scene ends with him finding a mostly untouched supermarket after escaping the zombie where it then shows a title card and then he's walking around the store completely fucking healed.  I would have been willing to accept that he found some medical supplies either in a back room or in the asiles of the store and patched himself up off camera but there's no bandage or any evidence of that kind of thing at all.  It's like the entire sequence of him getting injured was written way after the fact OR, and given how stupid the show is I'm assuming this to be the case, they fucking forgot.  The lack of attention to any kind of detail or consistency just makes the entire production feel lazy. 

What's worse is that zombie features are such a well trodden road that the rules are basically written for you and barely any effort has to be put in for this kind of thing.  Hell, even games like Resident Evil were getting this shit right in 1996.  In RE1 the characters split up because they don't know what they are getting into and they are trained soldiers, in RE2 they get split up by unfortunate circumstance and in Black Summer they split up as if that idiot gas from Cabin in the Woods is just part of the air in that region of America.  When you're show can be compared to original Resident Evil and RE comes out on top as being the more intelligently put together piece of media, you have a BIG problem.

It's the exact issue I had with that stupid fucking movie called A Quiet Place.  Where all the "tension" of the show is generated by characters being stupid rather than any kind of clever scenario writing.  Despite pissing me off greatly I'm going to finish both seasons and if it magically gets better I'll come back and write a big apology to it but I imagine that it's only going to get worse from here.  It got cancelled after 2 seasons anyway so the chance of it getting any better is 0%