A disparate band of suburbanites come together as a mother tries to find her daughter six weeks into a zombie apocalypse…

I’m not a fan of Zombies as a rule. I have an academic, completist, film-buff’s interest in George Romero and (confession time!) The Walking Dead left me cold and I didn’t stay with it. Consequently, I had to be persuaded for professional reasons to give the Netflix series Black Summer a try. I’d never heard of it – having been released in April of 2019 and presumably lost somewhere in the shadow of its more established Zombie rival.

I know which I prefer by several lightyears. I think Black Summer is a remarkable piece of TV series drama. Not just a great addition to the Zombie apocalypse canon, but a masterclass in pure, stripped down and almost entirely visual storytelling.

If you want high tech zombies layered in prosthetics then you will be disappointed. In Black Summer you barely see the zombies at all, which is part of its brilliance. The whole thing seems to have been shot on a Canadian housing estate for pretty much no money whatsoever. Only three out of the eight episodes have anything resembling conventional dialogue scenes driving the action, and three have virtually no dialogue whatsoever beyond grunts, instructions and monosyllables. There is no exposition until the seventh episode, and even then, what we’re told may not be reliable. There is very little in the way of VFX. The characters neither know each other nor, for a variety of reasons (language, disability, class…) are they able to communicate with each other effectively. They don’t strike up instant friendships, nor do they emote lengthily, sharing their hopes, fears and memories. One of the central characters doesn’t speak English at all and there are no subtitles. We’re in this with them up to our necks and no one’s coming to our rescue. It’s about surviving from one moment to the next with any back story entirely implicit and absolutely no info dumps. This is very pure storytelling completely without frills and I love it. I’m a screen and radio writer by trade and I’m in awe of its economy.

Black Summer is elemental three-chord zombie drama which like the best post punk power pop is actually deceptively sophisticated, as it nods to Duel, Terminator 2, Aliens and a brilliant sideways take on Lord of the Flies along the way. The fourth episode is a ‘two-hander’, with one of its characters a zombie, and containing only two words of significant and heart-rending dialogue. That’s bold. If the show has a motto it’s ‘Never Apologise, Never Explain’.

About half way in I checked out last year’s reviews, wondering why it had so totally passed me by. A quick Google search revealed that it got a pretty lukewarm reception – perhaps because there had just been too much zombie stuff around at the time – but even so, I have no hesitation in breaking a golden rule of respectful, measured criticism and declaring loudly that everyone else is WRONG.

Verdict: If you haven’t seen it and you’ve run out of telly, and you’re into minimalist zombie doings, then this might be for you. And if the end is as deceptively ambiguous as the chapter called ‘Mirage’ implies, then I’m beyond excited to see where they take it in season two. My rating out of ten? I’ll give it twelve. 12/10

Martin Jameson