Tag: Z Nation

With all the events making national and international news right now, let’s discuss something really important: the exceptionally enjoyable zombie apocalypse series Z Nation which airs on Friday nights on the Syfy channel and subsequently on demand.

“I give you mercy” is Z Nation’s signature catchphrase when one of the principals puts an about-to-turn victim out of his or her misery. In this context, mercy has also become a verb.

Now in Season 5, the quirky and campy series which some have described as a horror comedy is a far more entertaining flesh-eater opus than The Walking Dead. The latter, now in its 9th season on AMC, could be a dead show walking as its viewership continues to drastically decay.

Former fans apparently don’t even want to hate-watch the show anymore. According to Deadline Hollywood, “the future is increasingly bleak” for TWD as a result of the ratings hitting all-time lows since its October debut.

The action-packed and lower budget Z Nation is simply a lot more fun to watch than TWD, given the latter’s mostly dour characters with their repetitive, tedious moralizing about zombie apocalypse ethics, a narrative that treads water for episodes in succession, inexplicable and absurd plot developments, and self-righteous characters who ping-pong from pacifism to stone-cold killers and then back to pacifism. Then there is the disproportionate face-time for a peripheral character who you know won’t be alive at the end of the episode.

Despite ongoing hand-to-hand combat with zombies, it was only in TWD Season 8, moreover,that the show revealed that a survivor might get sick from being covered in zombie blood or guts.

The departure of stars Andrew Lincoln and Lauren Cohan (who play Rick Grimes and Maggie Rhee, respectively) isn’t helping matters any. It also calls into serious question why the showrunners decided to kill off Carl, Rick Grimes’ TV son (Chandler Riggs) who was poised to become the next-generation leader of the survivors. [AMC subsequently announced that it was planning several original Rick Grimes-focused movies for the TWD universe.]

With that in mind, TWD has received criticism online for too much chat and not enough splat.

Filmed in Washington state, the “cheesy” Z Nation has featured the following that you will never see on Georgia-based The Walking Dead: a giant zombie-killing cheese wheel, zombies on Viagra, zombie pole dancers, the iconic Liberty Bell in Philadelphia pulverizing zombies, a communicative zombie named “grandpa,” Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin as an autograph-signing zombie, a struggle with a drug cartel which trafficked in “Z weed,” and the birth of a zombie-human hybrid zombaby, who aged after a very rapid, apocalyptic growth spurt, and who was played by several different actresses.

Is Z Nation‘s tone getting too serious? read more