Revival premieres Thursday, June 12 on Syfy.
The most interesting storytelling decision in Syfy’s Revival (an adaptation of the Image comic by Mike Norton and Tim Seeley) is also the source of its most frustrating issues: After an effectively scary opening scene in which the corpses in a morgue all suddenly spring to life (including a man in the middle of being cremated), we’re fast-forwarded 35 days into the future – when everyone has largely accepted a new normal shaped by what they dub “Revival Day.” On that day, everyone who had died within a seemingly arbitrary two-week period in Wausau, Wisconsin was mysteriously resurrected, and in the month or so that followed, all of the obvious drama stirred up by such a bizarre event was seemingly addressed offscreen. The juicier philosophical questions that flow out from this premise are grim, powerful stuff – there are a lot of predictable religious questions surrounding the so-called “revivers” – but they’re also frequently undone by a less-predictable sense of humor. It might seem counterintuitive to the scenes where Revival is aiming to be more of a thriller, or a drama, or a full-on horror-story – but it’s also, weirdly, where it feels most alive.
The time jump frees Revival up to explore what “everyday” life now looks like in this small town, and it’s pretty fascinating when it does. One of the revivers was a criminal who died of a stroke while serving a life sentence in prison and is now walking free – so does the fact that he died mean he paid his debt to society? There’s also a grieving woman whose husband died the day before the Revival Day cutoff, meaning he stayed dead. The characters also question if some people revived without knowing it, like if they died in their sleep and just woke up as usual the next morning.
Rank these TV shows about the walking dead
Rank these TV shows about the walking dead
So what’s to be made of the funny energy that gives Revival its biggest spark? This is no Shaun Of The Dead-style “we’re all having fun with this weird situation we’re in” kind of thing; it stems almost entirely from central character Dana Cypress (Syfy original vet Melanie Scrofano), who is pretty much the only person in Wausau who isn’t going through some larger weird thing tied to Revival Day. And because Revival refuses to commit to any of the more obvious tones for a show about the dead rising from the grave, it’s the comedy that becomes easiest to connect with.
Dana is a cop, and her father (JAG’s David James Elliott, who unfortunately seems to think he’s on a more serious show) happens to be the sheriff. Her dream of someday getting out of Dodge was dashed by a post-Revival Day government quarantine, so she’s stuck dealing with her authoritarian father and the weirdly active criminal community of her hometown.
Her response to the disappointments in her life (her mother died tragically and the father of her son is a rarely mentioned deadbeat) is to approach every situation with dry sarcasm and a deranged lust for chocolate, and Scrofano impressively pulls it off without devolving into a Joss Whedon-y quip machine. The smart distinction is that her humor is a defense mechanism for boredom, not for deflating danger or anxiety, so she’s more likely to make a funny comment when there’s nothing happening than when there’s something scary going on. The trade-off is that the dramatic scenes can’t lean on “Dana says something funny” as a crutch, because she locks in and becomes a good cop, which is why those scenes can feel a little flatter – save for some touching ones involving a little girl who revived and her bad, religious parents.
Luckily, Dana has backup from Ibrahim Ramin (Andy McQueen), a CDC scientist who carries some of the more expositional plot stuff and serves as a carefully pitched foil to Dana. Though her first name implies a certain, X-Files-derived stock dynamic for this kind of show (one weirdo, one skeptic), Ibrahim isn’t the Scully to her Mulder or the Mulder to her Scully – rather, it’s like Dana is both Scully and Mulder and Ibrahim is a normal person who happened to cross paths with them and is quietly impressed that everyone around him has a big personality. They make for a lovable duo.
But while the characters are mostly compelling, the town of Wausau itself doesn’t fare as well. It’s a real place that is genuinely in the middle of nowhere (no offense to Wausans), but Revival treats it like the setting of every other TV show about a small town with a mystery. Think Twin Peaks but not as strange, or the Alaskan town in season 4 of True Detective but it’s not always nighttime. Most viewers wouldn’t notice, since most viewers probably don’t know Wausau is even a real place, but Revival occasionally uses establishing shots of the real city that make it clear that 40,000 people live there and that its downtown boasts a couple of high-rises (including one that is the tallest commercial building in the state outside of Milwaukee!). Yet the specificity of those images never carries over to the anonymous way Wausau is pictured and depicted – a casualty of TV production on a Syfy budget, not to mention filming in Canada.
That slight incongruity adds to a larger issue that Revival has with the world it takes place in. Because those first 35 days get skipped, we don’t see anyone’s reactions to Revival Day – we’re told that the cops are setting up a registry of revivers, we’re told that the federal government won’t let anyone in or out, and everyone has already either learned to accept the revivers or is quietly stewing about how much they hate them (but is perfectly willing to sit on their hands and do nothing until the events of the series premiere).
For every interesting question Revival poses, there are two more that are just hand-waved away.
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The rules of this fictional universe are so vaguely established that it takes some time before Revival establishes that revivers can heal super fast, but only from injuries that occurred after they died. A character who died from an untreated infection still has a gross wound on his hand but can cut his chest open with no repercussions, while another character rips out their own teeth just for them to grow back in seconds. But if that’s the case, why doesn’t the reviver who gets a dramatic haircut at one point not have their old hairdo seconds after the scissors were put away?
It’s not a show-breaking issue, but it does weaken its structure. When one of the revivers goes rogue early on and starts attacking people, it seems like a setup for the inevitable dark side of this apparent miracle, but it’s explicitly presented as a one-off with a direct cause (even if no one is quite sure what that cause is right away). This is used as an opportunity for the government to research whether or not revivers can be re-killed, which is a smart/scary thread, but… surely someone would’ve thought of that in those 35 days, right? Why does it take over a month to find out that they have Wolverine-esque healing powers, or for either the state or federal government to get directly involved? For every interesting question Revival poses, there are two more that are just hand-waved away.
And that can be okay! A fixation on “plot holes” is destroying our enjoyment of TV shows and movies as it is, but it is a problem when a show lets you wonder why one thing matters and another thing doesn’t matter. Eventually, I started to ask whether or not anything in Revival even matters at all. What’s good here is impressively solid – it’s just that the standout performances and clever hooks get buried by tonal inconsistencies and muddy logic.
