Revival review – step up, Walking Dead fans! This is the most moving zombie show ever

6 hours ago 5

A teenage girl is pale, withdrawn and seems not to be fully in or of this world. Could she be … a zombie? “She just likes the Cure,” weary police officer Dana Cypress (Wynonna Earp’s Melanie Scrofano) assures the anxious mother at the station.

It’s good to get the mandatory goth joke out of the way early in an undead-centred show, and Revival – a 10-part adaptation of the comic books by Tim Seeley and Mike Norton – is briskly efficient. It begins with a man bashing his way out of a crematorium furnace while others in the corpse-queue start to stir and the recently buried start to climb out of their graves and wonder, frankly, WTF is going on.

As, of course, do we, the delighted viewers, already aware that we are in confident, capable hands and eager to see what yikes and yuks come next.

WTF is going on is that, in the pre-smartphone era in the small, nondescript town of Wausau, Wisconsin, on a random day, everyone who died in the previous fortnight is resurrected. After the event, it takes the town a while to work out the parameters – how far it went, who qualified and so on, hence the goth problem. And, although by the end of the subsequent month-long lockdown imposed on the town, the police chief (Dana’s father) has compiled a list of the Revivers, as they become known, Dana points out that it may not be complete. Anyone who died alone and in their sleep, for example, and woke up apparently normally would not necessarily know he or she was dead. Hmm, says the astute viewer. Noted, our Dana. Noted.

A woman with brown hair in a police uniform looks into the distance

But ordinary crime goes on, especially once the lockdown is lifted – although the town remains in quarantine, so is still cut off from the outside world. Dana begins investigating the case of a mutilated horse in the woods, only to find a handful of torn-out human teeth beside it and … well, uh-oh. It seems that, alongside the ability to self-heal, some of the undead have developed strengths and tastes that are unlikely to add to the general harmony of small-town life. They do, however, add to the gore level, which is good news for anyone who prefers their zombie tales more at the Walking Dead end of the spectrum and bad news for anyone who shrieks into the sofa whenever the top of someone’s head gets sliced off by a farm implement.

There is also, for Dana, the matter of her troubled little sister, Em (Romy Weltman). Em has a difficult relationship with their loving but volatile father, but the sibling bond still holds fast. Drug addiction after a car accident that killed their mother and an entanglement with her college professor have brought chaos to Em’s life, but Dana is there to help. They once dreamed of getting out of Wausau – Dana had just handed in her notice to her father and was leaving for a job in Chicago when Revival Day hit – and now they are trapped there by forces beyond their control. There have been worse and less tenderly drawn metaphors for the collapse of the American dream.

That’s really what marks Revival out from the herd of noirish, murder-mystery miniseries (whether driven by superheroes, zombies or something in between) with which we are inundated. For all its lightness and speed, and its cleaving to well-tested tropes, it contains moments of real poignancy. The sisters’ love for each other feels lumpy and real. The woman whose husband died one day too soon to qualify for revival and is driven mad by her compounded grief is immediately comprehensible. And the Reviver mother who cannot die and climbs into her son’s coffin at his funeral reminds us that there are horrors far beyond what brain-eating monsters can offer. As the hostility towards Revivers grows in the town, it is the young Reviver girl asking her schoolfriend why, if people are always so sad when someone dies, they aren’t happy that she is alive that stops them from becoming too heavy-handed a representation of racism and contemporary anti-immigrant sentiment and keeps the story supple.

Add to that Scrofano’s performance: she has an offbeat and idiosyncratic energy that makes her mesmerising but still so credible that she only adds to the show’s quality rather than throwing it off its stride – and you have a three-and-a-half-star show that I’m rounding up to four because she deserves it – and we deserve more of her.