We’ve previously written articles about shows you might have missed, covering Warehouse 13 and Being Human respectively. This one is a little different, as the show is slightly more obscure, and nowhere near as long-running as those previously discussed: Charlie Brooker’s mini-series Dead Set.
As Brooker’s first foray into non-comedy television writing, Dead Set could have been a colossal flop, particularly given the ‘zombies invade the Big Brother house’ elevator pitch that could have spewed out of the mouth of the most vacuous television executive desperately attempting to capture any fleeting craze in an attempt to boost ratings. However, with the dark, biting mind of Charlie Brooker behind the concept, it was already a step ahead of the images the description conjures, and upon watching it, Dead Set gained yet more ground on those flimsy thoughts and ideas.
In true ‘Shows You Might Have Missed’ style, here are five reasons why you should seek out and watch Dead Set right now!
Spoilers and frank discussion of violence and gore lie ahead…
1. It’s really funny…sort of…
If you’re aware of Charlie Brooker’s other productions (from Screenwipe to Black Mirror and the more recent A Touch of Cloth), you’ll be aware of his particular style of humour: if you’re not, think angry and dark with just a touch of incredibly stupid. Dead Set is no exception from this rule, with some jet-black humour involved, mostly revolving around Andy Nyman’s truly despicable producer Patrick. For example, in episode one, he shoves a man in a wheelchair in front of a charging zombie to buy himself some extra time to hide in a toilet cubicle. Subsequently, he has to have a scrap with the now-zombified man, who has remained in his wheelchair, in order to escape the toilet.
However, Patrick’s presence is excused by some of the best and funniest lines in the show and Brooker’s oeuvre as a whole: one of my very favourites is an exchange between him and Pippa, a vacuous Big Brother contestant he finds himself trapped with:
Pippa: I wish you’d stop huffing, you’ll use up all the air.
Patrick: It’s not a submarine, you specimen. Do you understand how air works?
Pippa: You’ve just wasted even more air!
Patrick: Do you even understand what is going on here or is the whole world just colours and shapes and the occasional noise in your head?
Honestly, it’s worth 3 hours of your time just for writing like that.
2. It’s very gory. Very gory indeed.
A lot of television horror shows shy away from blood and guts, but when your subject matter is as potentially squishy as Dead Set’s, that isn’t really an option. Fortunately for horror fans, rather than shying away from gore, Dead Set charges it head-on, foaming at the mouth like one of the undead creatures it portrays, and provides some of the meatiest violence and gore I’ve personally ever seen.
In episode one, the main character Kelly caves in a zombie’s head with a fire extinguisher, and the resulting flurry of violence is incredibly, for want of a better word, ‘chunky’. Similarly, in episode four, Patrick spends a good portion of the episode hacking the body of a former housemate into bite-sized chunks of delicious zombie food as a distraction, bait that is used throughout the final episode as Patrick runs around with bowls of the stuff, occasionally spilling some human juice on himself and others.
While many horror films use gore as a substitute for plot and character development, Dead Set uses it as a reminder of how horrific the situation the characters are in, and the disgusting things they have to do in order to survive. In short, it’s not gore for the sake of gore, it’s gore which is used because the situation being depicted would involve serious, horrific amounts of violence and gore.
I’m not going to lie, Davina…you’ve looked better.
3. It’s dripping with references.
In a zombie show which is set in the Big Brother house, Dead Set has two rich veins of popular culture to reference, and Brooker wastes no time filling the show with references to both. In fact, he goes as far as bringing real life Big Brother contestants into the show, as they are having a backstage party as the zombie invasion occurs. Davina McCall shows up as both herself, and a zombified version of herself in the first two episodes, and a number of the characters are based on previous Big Brother contestants.
But for me it’s the references to zombie fiction which linger. For example, in a great example of a joke being set up far in advance of the punchline, one of the fictional BB contestants is referred to by another as ‘Barbara’ due to his homosexuality. While this seems to be a flippantly derogatory remark and nothing more, it reveals itself as a clever reference when the zombie threat is revealed, prompting the line
“They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”
This is, of course, an iconic line from George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. There is also a reference to the Spanish-Italian horror B-movie Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, also known as The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, as Patrick says that Angel, one of the contestants in the house, has a ‘face like a Manchester Morgue’.
One of the finest referential moments, however, comes in Patrick’s final moments, as he recreates the actions of Captain Rhodes in Day of the Dead. Not only does he betray the other survivors in order to escape, but when he is getting torn apart by zombies following his betrayal he yells to them:
“I’ve got fucking bowels full of shit: eat it!”
An obvious reference to Rhodes’ final line:
“Choke on ‘em!”
4. The characters are actually intelligent enough to make their survival believable.
A lot of survivors in zombie movies and TV shows make decisions so stupid that it makes it downright unfeasible that they could have survived for any length of time. Take The Walking Dead, for example: Lori Grimes is a character who fails so consistently that it’s entirely unbelievable that she could have survived normal life without accidentally stabbing herself through the eyes while trying to chop carrots, let alone during a dangerous zombie apocalypse for as long as she did.
The characters in Dead Set, on the other hand, seem genuinely intelligent enough to survive the zombie apocalypse (although Marky does possess a more…’physical’ intelligence than the others), mostly because they realise what they have to do to survive. Namely, smash zombies’ heads in and chop dead bodies up as bait.
They also observe things far more effectively than many other characters: as Angel is transformed into a zombie, they ‘keep’ her for a while, noticing that she can’t get out of the swimming pool and using this information to work out that the zombies have a very low level of intelligence, and that this means the humans will be able to win eventually. While this doesn’t work out exactly as planned (see below), it nonetheless displays real life logic, not movie logic, and that is something which is sorely lacking in many works of zombie fiction.
Enjoy upbeat, happy endings? Probably best to avoid ‘Dead Set’, then…
5. It doesn’t end well…
In many ways, Dead Set is one of the most realistic works of zombie fiction out there, and the ending supports this idea. In most zombie movies, even if the undead threat is still present, there is usually some element of hope left intact. Whether this is through a survivor who has immunity to the infection, or a gradual quelling of the zombie threat varies from film to film, but more often than not there is something which acts as the light at the end of the tunnel.
This is where Dead Set stands apart from most zombie fiction: there is no happy, or even vaguely hopeful ending. Every single character ends up like Patrick, dead with nothing left of them but a smear of blood and a few scraps of meat, or zombified and still trapped in the Big Brother house. Not only that, but it seems that the whole world is zombified, as the closing shot of a zombie in a shopping centre transfixed on the still-running feed of Big Brother on the television. There is no light, there is no hope, just blood, guts and zombies.
So my advice is to take 3 hours, switch off the lights and enjoy Dead Set in all its meaty, darkly funny glory. Probably best not to watch while you’re eating, though…
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