I’ve watched “Black Summer” on Netflix so you don’t have to…
I’ll grant that I am often busy doing other things and some TV shows sit in the background, so I don’t get fully immersed in them. I’ll often give a new show a couple of uninterrupted episodes before relegating it to background viewing.
“Black Summer” from Netflix was one I was going to give a miss, until a couple of folks I follow on Twitter wrote nice things about it… but in my opinion, those nice things were unwarranted. This show is not a great one. It’s not a good zombie show.
Well it has some good zombies, it’s an American show with European zombies… as in, the zombies in this show run, unlike pretty much every other American zombie show where zombies just lumber around.
But it has crappy characters.
Spoilers follow…
Few of them give you anything to root for. There’s no real backstory for any of them and no character development throughout the show… well except for the bit where the mum womans-up and suddenly goes from scared and frail to apparently knowing all about weapons.
Some of them just deserve to die. One in particular can’t shut a door to literally save his own life. Being chased by a single zombie he runs through houses opening doors along the way and never once closing one behind him.
Then there’s the Korean lady who speaks no English, but clearly understands English. I have no issue with her not speaking English, but that we don’t even get subtitles shows that her words aren’t meant to be adding to the story, in once scene she basically has an extended monologue that no one understands, not even the viewer gets an insight to her story.
So save yourself the hours of watching this one. The final episode has our survivors almost making it to the stadium that has been their destination all along, only to be suddenly joined by a bunch of others survivors and then all indiscriminately shooting in all directions at single zombies that come out and predictably they all shoot other living folks, creating yet more zombies. And no one seems to be able to get a clean headshot or has an ability to keep a zombie down.
It’s lame, I’m glad someone got paid to make it, but I wish they had made it better.