A woman in a packed police station points at the teenager next door, the one in black clothes and goth makeup, and asks if she’s one of the risen dead.
“That’s Tina — she just likes The Cure,” says an exhausted Dana Cypress.
That exchange tells you most of what you need to know about Revival, which is now streaming on Netflix after a run on Syfy in 2025. It’s a zombie show that’s funny about being a zombie show, and it’s also a family drama that takes its wounds seriously.
The town where the recently dead get up and walk home
Created by Aaron B. Koontz and Luke Boyce, and based on the comic series by Tim Seeley and Mike Norton, Revival is set in Wausau, Wisconsin, a small town that turns into a national story overnight. The recently deceased come back to life. Some crawl peacefully out of their graves looking for family. Others wake up screaming inside the incinerator.
The event gets a name, Revival Day, and then it gets a media frenzy and a government-enforced quarantine while health experts and authorities try to work out what happened.
Dana (Melanie Scrofano) is a divorced cop who’s spent her entire life trying to get out of Wausau. She’s finalizing a move to Chicago with her son (Hudson Robert Wurster), waiting on a transfer approval, and then the dead ruin her exit strategy. Her boss is also her father, the town Sheriff (David James Elliott), a man you’d want beside you in a crisis and would rather not spend 24 hours a day with.
Every case she works now comes with a new complication. The culprit might not be alive.
The Revivers are mostly fine, which is the unsettling part
Plenty of people in Wausau throw their arms around the loved ones they just buried. Plenty of others are waiting for the other shoe to drop. A revived girl at school gets called “zombie girl” by classmates who won’t go near her when nobody’s watching.
Most Revivers are peaceful and want their old lives back. That doesn’t mean they’re normal. Cuts and life-threatening injuries don’t take. An old woman’s teeth fall out and grow back within the minute. Some develop supernatural abilities, including extraordinary strength.
And some come back wrong, aggressive and unmoored from reality.
The genre is crowded, which is the whole problem with paranormal procedurals. The X-Files, iZombie, decades of them, something for the hardcore horror sickos and something for people who just want spooky vibes and good character dynamics. Revival earns its spot by looking sideways at the formula.
It owes as much to The Leftovers as it does to Romero
The gory bits are here and they’re satisfying. But Revival is more interested in what an unexplainable event does to a community, the way The Leftovers was. In Wausau, some people are still waiting for their own dead to wake up, and they’ll go to unpleasant lengths to make it happen. Digging a body out of the ground and bringing it home. Locking a Reviver who’s behaving terrifyingly in the barn and pretending nothing’s changed.
What actually makes it worth 10 episodes is the Cypress family. Each episode peels back another piece of backstory that explains why these people treat each other the way they do.
Scrofano, a reliable Canadian TV presence, plays Dana as resourceful and immature at once, at her most watchable when she’s making a rash decision to close a case. Em (Romy Weltman), her sickly younger sister, comes home after a bad college experience, carrying tension and misunderstandings with her dad. With Dana she’s prickly and a little distant, and also loving and protective.
The writers don’t rush any of it. You finish episodes wondering what broke these relationships and whether they can be repaired.
Season two isn’t a sure thing
The first season aired last year and it’s unknown whether a second will be ordered. Koontz thinks the Netflix numbers could decide it.
“We have always believed there is a much bigger audience out there for this show,” he said. “The response from the people who found Revival on Peacock was incredible, but Netflix gives it an entirely new life.”
If you’re the type who won’t start a show without a guaranteed ending, relax: the first season’s murder mystery gets resolved in the finale.
Revival has the bones of B-movie schlock, fast pace, funny dialogue, gory thrills, and it spends just as much energy on how a town metabolizes the impossible and on the family sitting in the middle of it. It has its cake and eats it too.
Revival is streaming on Netflix.
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