‘Z Nation’ offers video game levels of violence
Just as Caesar divided Gaul into three parts, there happen to be three kinds of zombie stories. The first batch feature the slow and shuffling menace. Dead people may be animated, but they’re in no particular hurry.
This style began with George Romero’s 1968 classic “Night of the Living Dead” and continues to this day with “The Walking Dead,” the AMC horror drama that has limped its way to spectacular ratings and a cult audience.
In 2002, director Danny Boyle brought us “28 Days Later” and the fast and frantic zombie genre was born. These nonliving corpses are quicker than an NFL halfback. They’re sprinters, and their manic pace is exacerbated by quick- cut editing and other visual techniques. As Boyle explains in the excellent documentary “Side by Side,” his movie could not have been done without the proliferation of cheap digital cameras that enabled him to shoot zombie mayhem from a dozen different angles, better to slice and dice in the editing room.
The new Syfy series “Z Nation” (9 p.m.) is very much of the quick zombie genre. These rotting corpses come at you like wild cheetahs.
Oh, and there’s a third genre — the zombie comedy — whimsical, sometimes metaphorical sendups of the first two variations, such as “Shaun of the Dead” and the vastly underrated 2006 Canadian satire “Fido,” about a lonely boy who adopts a pacified zombie as a pet.
“Z Nation” is no comedy. In fact, outside of the NFL, it’s probably the most harrowing and violent thing you’ll see on TV this week.
The story is rather simple. We’re years beyond the boilerplate Zombie Apocalypse. Only a handful of living people exist and half of them seem to be military or paramilitary in nature. A soldier (Harold Perrineau, “Lost”) is assigned to accompany a special patient from somewhere near New York to a California facility. The patient may be carrying a vaccine capable of making people zombieproof. On the wayWest, we encounter other sturdy, if somewhat skeptical souls (Tom Everett Scott, Kellita Smith, Anastasia Baranova, Keith Allan and Russell Hodgkinson) willing to join a cross-country trek strewed with zombie ambushes and the attendant brain-splattering defense tactics.
DJ Qualls (“Lost,” “Supernatural”) stars as a soldier at some lonely Arctic outpost, keeping radio contact with the ragtag team as they forge ahead on their mission to deliver “the package” to California. His radio is never entirely functional and it’s not entirely clear if he’s still in touch with reality. And that’s a nice touch.
Like “The Walking Dead,” “Z Nation” has moments of calm punctuated by tsunamis of violence and gore. And the whole style is much more adrenalized. If “The Walking Dead” harks back to the Western, “Z Nation” evokes the highly artificial violence of video games and the movies (“300”) they have inspired.
“Z Nation” takes television violence to levels that may be unsettling and even repulsive to many. Let’s not even go into the scene with the baby. To say more about that is to say too much.
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS
In a world without rules, can 15 exhibitionists create a “Utopia” (7 p.m., WHBQ-TV Channel 13)?
Gordon Ramsay revisits past disasters on the season finale of “Kitchen Nightmares” (8 p.m., WHBQ-TV Channel 13).
An uplifting artifact is profiled on the seventhseason premiere of “Mysteries at the Museum” (8 p.m., Travel).