This 5-Part Zombie Series Deserves As Much Love As The Walking Dead

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Though it came out before The Walking Dead, the British miniseries Dead Set doesn’t often get recognized for being one of the first zombie shows on television. After The Walking Dead became popular, many other shows attempted to replicate its success with similar zombie themes.

Shows like HBO’s The Last of Us and Netflix’s All of Us Are Dead were truly exceptional. Other zombie series, including Z Nation, Black Summer, and the Zombieland TV show, had mixed results and never quite reached the same level of success as the original, well-known series.

Dead Set Was A Revolutionary Zombie Series That Released Before The Walking Dead

It’s interesting to note that before The Walking Dead became popular, another zombie show had a big impact on the genre but often goes unrecognized. Dead Set, released in 2008, was a darkly comedic horror series that cleverly imagined a zombie outbreak happening during a season of the reality show Big Brother.

Okay, so for anyone who hasn’t stumbled across it, Big Brother is a reality show where a group of people live together in a house, completely cut off from the outside world – no news, no phones, nothing. They’re filmed 24/7, and that’s it. When Dead Set came out, the British version of Big Brother was absolutely massive, a real cultural phenomenon. It’s important to understand that context going in.

The idea behind the reality show Big Brother is clever, but it also makes a surprisingly good setting for a zombie apocalypse story. The show already takes place in a secure location with limited contact to the outside world, and the conflicts between the houseguests are bound to create intense drama – a perfect setup for surviving a zombie outbreak.

While the Netflix series All of Us Are Dead also told a compelling zombie story with a group of unlikely survivors trapped together, it lacked the sharp social commentary of Dead Set. Dead Set cleverly used a reality TV show setting to critique both the entertainment industry and the way we perceive what’s real versus what’s not.

Dead Set Didn’t Get A Sequel, But Paved The Way For Black Mirror

Image courtesy of Everett Collection

Although Dead Set wasn’t renewed for a second season, it feels like its ideas lived on in Charlie Brooker’s popular show, Black Mirror. Both shows explore similar ideas, like how media can distort reality and how technology can isolate people rather than connect them.

Although Black Mirror sometimes feels less relevant now that technology is changing so quickly, it was once a powerful critique of how smartphones and social media were often presented as purely beneficial to society. The show Dead Set similarly offered a sharp commentary on the popularity of reality television in the 2000s.

Even before reality TV became widely criticized for being shallow, Dead Set pointed out how its competitive nature encouraged people to only look out for themselves. Interestingly, Dead Set actually predicted and satirized the growth of social media – years before it became popular, and even before The Walking Dead first aired.

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2026-03-17 21:40