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  "path": "/best-zombie-tv-shows",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-19T19:40:02.000Z",
  "site": "https://nofilmschool.com",
  "tags": [
    "Zombie tv shows",
    "The walking dead",
    "Santa clarita diet",
    "Izombie",
    "In the flesh",
    "Ash vs. the evil dead",
    "Horror tv",
    "Zombies",
    "zombie movie",
    "www.youtube.com",
    "DON'T DEAD OPEN INSIDE",
    "IGN",
    "television adaptation",
    "Rolling Stone",
    "GamesRadar",
    "Den of Geek",
    "ComicBook.com",
    "zombie premise",
    "CBR",
    "told a California news outlet",
    "NME"
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  "textContent": "\n\n\n\nThere was a period in the early aughts when it felt like zombie movies were _everywhere_. I'm not sure what the deal was, though you could make a pretty compelling case that _28 Days Later_ opened a door in 2002 that nobody could close again, with Danny Boyle treating the genre like it deserved a real budget and a real cinematographer.\n\nThe remake machine cranked up immediately. _Dawn of the Dead_ got a redo in 2004. _Shaun of the Dead_ arrived the same year and was so good that it made you forgive everything that came after it. Suddenly, everyone had a zombie script. Heck, I even wrote a zombie script a few years later.\n\nThen the whole thing migrated to TV, which turned out to be where it really belonged. Two hours is barely enough time to establish a post-apocalyptic world. Zombie stories are a reflection of societal issues and require a lot of strong character work. The undead world arguably works better across seasons, where you have room to make audiences actually care about the people who might get eaten.\n\nThese five shows made the most of that.\n\n- YouTube www.youtube.com\n\n## _The Walking Dead_\n\nYou knew this was coming. It has to be included, with its massive popularity and countless spin-offs.\n\nRobert Kirkman's comic-to-screen adaptation ran for 11 seasons and essentially defined what zombie TV looks like in the modern era.\n\nRick Grimes wakes from a coma into the apocalypse (DON'T DEAD OPEN INSIDE) and spends roughly a decade trying to hold his people together. What kept it compelling, at least in its peak years, was the show's insistence that the actual monsters are human.\n\nIn a now-famous 2007 IGN interview, he admitted he pitched Image Comics a fake alien-invasion twist just to get the book greenlit, and later confessed he'd made the whole thing up.\n\n> \"I basically just lied to them and said, 'Well look, this is how it's going to be: The whole book is going to be as I pitched it, but as the issues progress, eventually I'm going to reveal that it was actually aliens who caused the zombie uprising. And it's going to be leading to this big battle between the humans and the aliens, and the aliens did this to kind of weaken the humans' military forces, and eventually it's going to be this big alien invasion.' And so they said, 'Oh yeah, that sounds sweet! Let's do that.'\"\n\nBy the time the television adaptation came around, he'd had time to reckon with the genre's limitations.\n\n\"Zombies are essentially people who eat people, so it's a cannibal show,\" Kirkman told Rolling Stone. \"I was like, 'I can't foresee there being a cannibal show on television!'\"\n\nObviously, he was wrong about that. Not to mention, _The Terror_ came out a few years later.\n\n- YouTube www.youtube.com\n\n## _In the Flesh_\n\nHere's the one you need to watch if you haven't. It's a truly unique and sensitive entry in the genre.\n\nThe two-series BBC drama from Dominic Mitchell imagines a world where the zombie dead have been medically rehabilitated, given medication to suppress their urges, and sent home to their families.\n\nThe returned are called \"Rotters\" and \"Partially Deceased Syndrome sufferers,\" and the bigotry the show examines maps uncomfortably well onto real-world prejudice. The horror is social.\n\nMitchell described his approach as \"kitchen sink horror\" in an interview with GamesRadar.\n\nHe added, \"What’s great is you can have a really emotional scene between Kieren and his sister, then the next scene zombies are popping out of graves. So if you tire of the domestic-type, kitchen sink drama, you’re gonna have that action to counter-balance it.\"\n\nBut what he really cared about were the characters.\n\n\"If we took away the genre stuff, would it still work as a drama? Would this storyline still work, and would we care?\" he told Den of Geek.\n\nThe show won the BAFTA for Best Mini-Series. It was canceled after two seasons. But I still see this one pop off on Tumblr occasionally, for good reason.\n\n- YouTube www.youtube.com\n\n## _iZombie_\n\nRob Thomas (as in the _Veronica Mars_ guy, not the Matchbox Twenty guy) adapted a Vertigo comic into a procedural in which Seattle medical examiner Liv Moore (Rose McIver) solves murders by eating the victims' brains and inheriting their memories and personality traits.\n\nIt's funny and smart and something fresh to chew on.\n\nThomas was upfront about how much he changed from the source material. He told ComicBook.com:\n\n> \"Even in the comic book she tries to solve these outstanding issues of the dead and we play that in the TV series as well. What I needed was a story mechanism that allowed her to do it every week. I wanted very closed cases and working in the police morgue gave me a dead, murdered body each week which made it easier to adapt as a TV show.\"\n\nThis way, he had a clean procedural engine that let the show function as a weekly genre blender.\n\nThe results ran five seasons and hold up as one of the more inventive takes on the zombie premise TV has tried.\n\n- YouTube www.youtube.com\n\n## _Ash vs. Evil Dead_\n\nTechnically, this one features more Deadites than zombies, but if the genre is a tent, this show lives comfortably under it. Sam Raimi revived his beloved _Evil Dead_ franchise as a half-hour Starz series, bringing Bruce Campbell back as Ash Williams, still chainsaw-handed, and still inexplicably the best option humanity has.\n\nRaimi understood what TV could and couldn't do compared to his films.\n\n\"We're trading off a lot of the crazy camerawork in the series for time with the character of Ash and watching his interactions,\" he told Den of Geek. \"It takes time and budget to do a lot of that crazy camera stuff. It takes the development of rigs and a lot of preproduction planning. In TV, I’m finding it works much quicker than that. So, the strengths of TV are the character, and that’s where we’re trying to concentrate on the show.\"\n\nThat turned out to be a smart trade. Showrunner Craig DiGregorio described Raimi's core mandate for the series' tone in an interview with CBR.\n\n\"Don't overthink it, just go do it. Make the episodes fun and crazy.\"\n\nThree seasons of gleeful, blood-soaked chaos followed.\n\n- YouTube www.youtube.com\n\n## _Santa Clarita Diet_\n\n_Santa Clarita Diet_ , my beloved. Gone too soon. This wacky comedy from Netflix found a suburban couple dealing with sudden undead-ness, and it was hilarious. It's also, I'll say confidently, some of Timothy Olyphant's best work.\n\nCreator Victor Fresco had a specific request going in, and that was not to call Sheila Hammond a zombie.\n\n\"I think the word 'zombie' is derogatory, so we don't use it,\" Fresco told a California news outlet. \"It sounds so negative, doesn’t it? 'Zombie.' So we just call her undead, or livingly challenged, perhaps.\"\n\nWhat Fresco built instead was a suburban domestic comedy in which Drew Barrymore and Olyphant play real estate agents whose marriage (and dinner options) change dramatically when Sheila becomes undead. The show is absurd and surprisingly sweet.\n\nThe deeper idea was a riff on narcissism and empowerment. Fresco told NME:\n\n> \"The undead are the ultimate narcissists. They're empowered because they only want what they want, when they want it. It’s exciting to watch Sheila become empowered, but you also have to live in a family, hopefully, and you want to be loved and be able to love, so you have to keep those impulses in check. Otherwise, they’ll destroy you. So it was a comment on that we as people and humanity are the ultimate zombies, and destroy and consume without consequence, and could end up consuming the entire earth and destroying ourselves.\"\n\nNetflix canceled it after three seasons, right on a cliffhanger, which remains an act of TV cruelty. But I'd say watch it anyway. The journey is worth it.\n\nWhat did we leave off the list? Do you think it's time for another zombie resurgence?",
  "title": "These Are the Best Zombie TV Shows"
}