Black Summer sunk its vicious zombie teeth in me
I got the bite for this Netflix zombie show, real bad. Plus, a reader offers another way to organise your music library properly...
I’d given up on zombie TV shows being good. They’re done. Played out. Like, totally over, dude. Then I found Black Summer, a Netflix show so brilliant I had to dedicate an entire newsletter to it. Forget everything you’ve ever known about zombie shows: this one is so good, it’s one of the best screen experiences I’ve had this year. Let’s go…
I was expecting an overstuffed cast list. I waited for lots of pointless, dire chit-chat. I knew there would be stupid cliffhangers and pointless excursions and for characters I care nothing about to be stuck in half-arsed situations, all for about five minutes of decent zombie action per episode.
I expected to take a trip to Lame-town.
Basically, when I tuned into Netflix’s superior zombie show Black Summer, I was expecting it to be The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead has lasted 11 seasons, four spin-off shows, three films and a deep-dive panel show. The Walking Dead sucks. I hate it. I spent seven seasons watching it, hoping it would get back to the kind of quality it delivered in season one. It never did. I wasted my time.
Black Summer is not a waste of time. Neither is it The Walking Dead. Black Summer is brilliant. Black Summer is vicious. Black Summer is the kind of zombie show I didn’t know I needed in my life until it arrived. It’s everything The Walking Dead could never be, and so, so much more. Black Summer’s teeth are stuck firmly in me. I have turned, and I’m not coming back.
For starters, it’s brutal. This is a show that thinks nothing of dispatching main characters with head shots, zombie bites, or knife attacks at completely random moments. Sometimes you’ve been following those characters for several episodes, and they just disappear under a pile of savage zombies, torn limb from limb, never to be seen again.
Black Summer’s not really about zombies. I mean, they’re there. And they’re hungry. Anyone who dies turns into one in mere seconds, and if that happens, you need to run, because they’ll eat your face off. And then you become one, and the cycle starts all over again. More than once I’ve been at the supermarket, looked around at all the shoppers and thought: “I wouldn’t survive in here.”
But that’s what the show’s about - survivors. To survive in the world of Black Summer means something. It’s hard. Like, you have to really want it. You have to be ready to leave everyone you love in seconds. If they’re dying, you’ve got to go, because they’ll turn, and then they’ll eat you.
I love that that’s the central concept to the show. The show’s cameras don’t pander to zombies, they focus on the people. Often, there’ll be absolute carnage underway, and all you’ll see is someone’s reaction to it, their eyes widening, their nostrils flaring, the camera right up in their face. It’s unnerving. It’s intense. At times, it’s also overwhelming. I binged all two seasons of Black Summer in a couple of weeks, but I could never watch more than one episode in a single night. It’s just too much.
Then there’s Lance. Lance is the main reason I fell in love with Black Summer. Poor, chunky, unfit, scared, inept, totally-not-cut-out-for-a-zombie-apocalypse Lance.
This is Lance. Lance should be the affable nerd in a high school graduation film, not cannon fodder in a chaotic world over-run by zombies. It’s clear from the moment you meet him, Lance isn’t going to last long in this world. When you get to the culmination of his story early in season two, you’ll be cheering the entire time.
Watching Black Summer is way more fun than I’m managing to describe here. In 2021, a zombie show just shouldn’t be this good, and yet it is. There are surprise cliffhangers, crazed twists, bottle episodes buried within bottle episodes, long shots that leave you wondering how they made this damned thing, and so much more.
I wish there was more than two seasons. I want 11 seasons, four spin-off shows and three movies of Black Summer, not the inert, gruelling, circular storytelling of The Walking Dead. At least I can go watch it all again, I guess. Maybe this time, Lance might win.
An update on complicated musical curation …
On Friday I published a piece about my friend Rob’s complicated techniques for hard-wiring new music into his brain. He still makes CD-Rs to listen to while driving, but the way he composes and curates them made my brain explode.
That piece was called: ‘Finding and organising new music is chaos.’
Afterwards, another friend, Tina, got in touch. She loved the piece, and asked me to follow it up by interviewing other people about their musical organisation methods. Instead of asking other people to contribute, I asked her to do it. She agreed.
Tina sent me a four-step process she uses to manage her music library that I found super-intriguing. While I won’t be burning CD-Rs like Rob, I could imagine myself using some of Tina’s methods myself.
Here’s how she does it…
On Spotify, for the last three years, I create a best of the year list, as if I am curating my own BBC Sound of 2021, or at least I think am. The criteria is that the publish date has to be that actual year, with some wiggle room for November and December 2020 releases. My favourite of the year so far is Close to You by Dayglow. It's a bop.
This year, after questioning from a friend, I started an Uncovered in 2021 playlist for new songs discovered but not released in 2021. It’s basically the Ted Lasso soundtrack, some Michael Kiwanuka, and anything I like being played at my co-working space that isn't new, like Father John Misty - that goes in here. So I have PARTYNEXTDOOR on both lists, he re-released the Colours EP for streaming in 2021, so I counted it on my 2021 list, while I have a song from 2017's Seven Days on the Uncovered playlist. I'm not gonna overthink this one. It's my list. I do what I want.
It's okay to shuffle! Embrace the shuffle! Songs should stand on their own. When you have an app that allows you to create radio stations based on songs or artists you discover while diving deep into a playlist, why not let that dictate your listening journey? (This isn’t a popular opinion, but I stand by it).
There is some stuff not on Spotify that I had to create a YouTube playlist for. Man, I wish these were on Spotify: Beyonce's cover of Sex on Fire; Sickick, a DJ who got some Instagram attention with his Michael Jackson-Aaliyah mash up of Rock With You and Rock The Boat; and perhaps the best thing I found this year although it's like a decade old: Childish Gambino's cover of Tamia's So Into You for Like a Version.
If you’d like to check out some more of Tina’s music recommendations, you can visit her Spotify page here…
Finally…
Here’s something to lighten up your day. It’s the trailer for Reservation Dogs, Taika Waititi’s new FX comedy series that’s made by a 100 per cent indigenous cast and crew. It looks so freaking good. Like, this is a pretty much perfect thing. I honestly can’t wait for this.
How can one talented Kiwi be responsible for so many dope things? What We Do in the Shadows AND Wellington Paranormal AND two Thor films AND Jojo Rabbit AND every other thing he’s touched that’s turned to gold? It’s insanity.
Take a good long look, or two, or three, at Reservation Dogs below …