Daybreak Review: Why Adults Ruin Everything in This Zombie Show

Daybreak review: the end of the world as a high-school comedy

Imagine being the John Everybody of nobodies. It is high school. You are a Canadian transfer student of below-average intelligence, and for some reason you are dating the most popular girl in school, whom you adore. Typical teen drama. Now nuke it, turn every adult into a zombie, and make every clique a territorial gang in a Mad Max-style world.

That is the premise of Daybreak, Netflix’s series from creators Brad Peyton and Aron Eli Coleite, who worked on Frontier and Heroes respectively. It is very loosely based on Brian Ralph’s comic of the same name, and creator Ralph always intended it as Ferris Bueller in the apocalypse. The camp setup can look silly at first glance, but it is a very good show for a Halloween-season binge, and it knows precisely what it is doing.

The ten episodes are packed with pop-culture references, from Breaking Bad ricin cigarettes to the bite rules of The Walking Dead zombies. As a Netflix zombie show, it is fun, over the top and often smarter than it looks, and it is a clear example of a streaming comedy that picks a lane and drives hard. Anyone who has seen enough zombie fiction will recognize the furniture, and the writers use that familiarity as a running joke.

What Daybreak is about

Daybreak is a young-adult survival comedy. Teenagers from different backgrounds have to beat the odds together in a world where adults over 18 have turned into zombie-like creatures called Ghoulies. They are unusual zombies. Ghoulies obsess over the mindless routines of the world before, such as sports statistics or hunting for a good sale on shoes, and the satire is clear: the adults ruined the world long before the bombs fell.

Episode one hints at a cause involving a trivial social media spat that offended a world leader and led to nuclear strikes, set off the Ghoulie disease and mutated a large part of the animal population. The show does not take the explanation seriously, and viewers should not either.

The story starts from the perspective of Josh Wheeler (Colin Ford), the Ferris Bueller of the series. Josh is on a quest to find his girlfriend, Sam, and he befriends Wesley, a gay Samurai pacifist on a quest for peace (Austin Crute), and Angelica, a twelve-year-old genius pyromaniac (Alyvia Alyn Lind) looking for a place to call home. Matthew Broderick, whose Ferris Bueller character inspired the whole idea, plays Principal Burr.

The gangs of Glendale

The world after the blast is organized by clique. Jocks have become mean warriors who treat nerds as prey, and the cheerleaders have grown into a gang of their own, the Cheerazons, an Amazon-like crew of badasses. Each group has its own rules, uniforms and ideas about leadership, and the show gets steady comedy out of the way social status from high school survives the end of civilization.

It is a smart way to use the setting. Instead of inventing a new set of apocalypse factions, the writers borrowed the ones every viewer already remembers from their own school days. The result is a post-apocalyptic world that is immediately legible and quick to satirize, and it keeps the story moving because audiences never need a lesson on how this society works.

Daybreak is a comedy first

The show asks for suspension of disbelief, and it plays on expectations in a way similar to Community, the sitcom set in Greendale. This one is set in Glendale. The kids survive the apocalypse using templates from television and film, which explains why the references keep coming. The post-apocalypse genre has been so exhausted in the last decade that a comedy about it feels refreshing, and as a Netflix zombie show for teenagers, it has few direct rivals.

The series also reaches into Gen X material, with Broderick as the most obvious example and the fourth-wall-breaking narration of Ferris Bueller as the clearest. Though aimed at younger viewers, it is rated mature, with some pot use, swearing and death scenes. Death is often the punchline, and as in The Walking Dead, most of the main cast stays unharmed. Expect explosions and some gore, most of it for comic effect.

Daybreak is also a drama

The teen-drama material is what viewers would expect: flashbacks to life before the end of the world, shifts in who the characters are now, identity politics, romance and the search for a group to call family. Most of the main cast were outcasts with neglectful parents, which is part of why their survival skills were already tuned before the apocalypse.

At first there does not seem to be much at stake. That changes after the first few episodes, when the story moves away from Josh and tells itself through other characters’ eyes. Every main character gets a backstory episode, and those episodes recontextualize moments the audience has already watched. The show reminds viewers that, as in high school, people should not be taken at face value. It also reveals that Josh and Sam’s campy romance was not as perfect as it looked, and it ties the backstory material into a villain storyline that most viewers will see coming.

A series that tries new formal tricks

Creatively, Daybreak plays with a surprising number of styles. There are point-of-view shifts, narration that breaks the fourth wall, scribbled doodles from the viewer-as-narrator, and themed episodes: a fourth-wall-breaking shoot of Daybreak itself featuring Ms. Crumble the witch, a slime-dealing backstory for Angelica in the vein of Breaking Bad, and an animated samurai episode for Wesley with RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan serving as his conscience and narrator.

There are musical numbers too, including a very funny Japanese rendition of a Backstreet Boys song. The show can handle sensitive topics, from sexuality and pronouns to women’s empowerment, and it can also have the jocks act like mean warriors toward nerds and suggest that popularity is just a form of leadership. In a world with no rules, who is to stop anyone from being themselves?

Daybreak at a glance

• Platform: Netflix, released October 24, 2019, with ten episodes.
• Creators: Brad Peyton and Aron Eli Coleite, loosely based on Brian Ralph’s comic.
• Main cast: Colin Ford, Alyvia Alyn Lind, Sophie Simnett, Austin Crute and Matthew Broderick as Principal Burr.
• Setting: Glendale High and the surrounding ruins, where adults have become Ghoulies.
• Status: Netflix cancelled the series in December 2019, after one season.

Verdict: give it until episode five

The best parts of Daybreak arrive when the show goes over the top and gets borderline silly. The performances are on point, the script is hilariously surprising, and the production quality is high. It is also an attempt to reach a niche that Netflix needed to fill, a Gen-Z audience that had few shows made specifically for it.

There is a larger point about taste. Daybreak will not please everyone, and a viewer who wants grim, serious survival drama will find it frivolous. A viewer who wants a loud, colorful, self-aware ride with a heart will find it hits a sweet spot. The ensemble does the heavy lifting: the cast plays teenagers who talk like teenagers, with enough confidence to land the jokes and enough vulnerability to sell the sincere moments.

Viewers should give it a chance at least until episode five, and know that everything serves a deeper character storyline. The first episodes can feel light, and the investment pays off once the backstory episodes land. Josh, Wesley and Angelica make a convincing found family, and their scenes are where the series is warmest.

The tragedy is that the payoff never got a second season. Netflix cancelled Daybreak in December 2019, only weeks after it premiered, so the finale is where the story ends. Even so, ten episodes of a funny, inventive, sometimes touching teen apocalypse make a solid single-season binge.

For anyone browsing for a Netflix zombie show that does not take itself seriously, this is among the more distinctive options, and its short run makes it an easy weekend watch.

Sources

• Daybreak (2019 TV series), Wikipedia — cast, premise and release details