I admittedly haven’t been keeping up with my zombie fiction lately. I haven’t watched The Walking Dead in many years, for example, and while stuff like Train to Busan is on my list I keep forgetting to fire it up at an opportune moment. It’s not a situation like Stephenie Meyer where she didn’t want to read or watch about horror, it’s just circumstance.

But anyhow, with that backlog weighing on my mind, I got around to checking out the pilot episode of a zombie series one of my friends had been talking up — Z Nation, a SyFy show whose first season is now on Netflix.

So far I’ll say this: if the pace of TWD is too slow for you, Z Nation will probably be right up your alley. The pilot barely stops to breathe as it keeps piling on the zombie attacks (and zombie tropes). By the end of it, I hadn’t really gotten much of a sense of the main characters or why I ought to care about them — in fact I joked to Dawn something along the lines of “Oh hey, all the PCs are together now.” And no I’m not really kidding about that, one character in particular pretty much joins up by shrugging and climbing into the back of the truck after they say “Hey you’re a good sniper, come with us.” The rest of the story is one you’ve probably seen before… zombie outbreak, America As We Know It has fallen, last outposts are trying to find a cure, and eventually a ragtag band is set up to make their way across the wasted nation.

So the show so far is not what I’d call particularly innovative or insightful, but if you want to see a lot of people get eaten and zombies get bashed/shot you’ve come to the right place. It’s fun to watch for that, even if we weren’t particularly compelled at the time to see what happens next. If any of you out there have watched more episodes I’d be interested to hear your take, does it stay with my first impressions more or less or go somewhere a little less traveled?