🚨 Stephen King’s Favorite Zombie Show Is Way Better Than The Walking Dead 🚨
👀 Did you know the King of Horror himself has a favorite zombie series? It’s not what you expect! This show is 85% fresh on Netflix, and it’s taking the world by storm. If you’re tired of the same old zombie formula, you NEED to see why Stephen King is hooked.

Zombies are a horror staple and have been since George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). Admittedly, zombies fall in and out as the trends of horror sway and inevitably turn back in on themselves, but currently, the horror world is experiencing a zombie renaissance. Zombies are on every horror buff’s mind right now. HBO’s The Last of Us is one of the best video game adaptations ever made. The Walking Dead franchise is branching off into multiple spin-offs and series. 28 Days Later, the movie that helped redefine the zombie subgenre, also got a long-awaited sequel, 28 Years Later, which is playing in theaters now.

There are so many new and ongoing zombie franchises, shows, and movies that it’s hard to keep up with them all, but Stephen King shines light onto a criminally underrated Netflix series. Black Summer ran for two seasons from 2019 to 2021, and despite being tragically overlooked, it’s one of the best post-apocalyptic shows of the last ten years. King praised the show for managing to make zombies scary again when zombie media seemed incapable of stirring up scares after so many iterations of the same thing.

Black Summer is a Z Nation Spin-off

Season 2 Bagged a Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score

Image via Netflix

Black Summer (2019-2021) is a Netflix original series that takes place in the Z Nation (2014-2018) universe. This spin-off series ran for two seasons and contains only 16 episodes, but it managed to make a lasting impression on critics. The series has an 85% Tomatometer overall on Rotten Tomatoes, but Season 2 managed to secure a perfect 100%. Since the series’ overall quality skyrocketed in the second season, it’s almost shocking to see that it wasn’t renewed for a third season. Some might attribute that to the Netflix curse. After all, the streaming service does have a horrible habit of canceling good shows after just a season or two.

Karl Schaefer and John Hyams created the series, with Hyams acting as the main writer and director. Abram Cox was brought on as an additional writer and director. Jaime King plays Black Summer’s protagonist, Rose, a mother searching for her missing daughter directly after the zombie outbreak. Black Summer focuses on the immediate aftermath of the zombie virus and how humanity hasn’t learned to adapt to the apocalypse yet. The early days of the zombie virus spreading are always the most dangerous, and Black Summer takes that claim seriously. Many zombie stories show brief flashbacks of the outbreak or have an episode or two dedicated to it, but take place much further into the future. Black Summer keeps the horror of the initial start of the apocalypse as its major focus.

On April 14, 2019, Stephen King took to Twitter (now X) to talk about his love for the series. King’s approval came after the first season aired, which, admittedly, was a bit rockier than Season 2. Black Summer might have been rough around the edges to start, but King saw the vision. He praised the series for managing to make zombies feel fresh and scary again when they’ve been done to death (pun intended). He also emphasized how much he enjoyed the setting of normal people trapped in the suburbs, fighting for survival.

“BLACK SUMMER (Netflix): Just when you think there’s no more scare left in zombies, THIS comes along. Existential hell in the suburbs, stripped to the bone.” – Stephen King’s tweet about Black Summer

King, a horror connoisseur and one of the most prolific horror authors of all time, knows the genre like the back of his hand. He’s the author behind incredible novels, novellas, and short stories that were later made into films and television series, like It, The Shining, The Mist, Carrie, Cujo, Pet Sematary, In the Tall Grass, and so many more. When King praises horror media, horror buffs should listen. King wasn’t the only person who had nothing but praise for Black Summer, though. Many critics and fans were blown away by the action sequences, the way survivors come together, and Rose’s leadership abilities.

Like The Walking Dead, Black Summer is a Character-Driven Story with Zombies

Black Summer is a Great Watch for Fans of The Walking Dead

Image via AMC Image via AMC

The Walking Dead (2010-2022) might have a lot of competition now for incredible zombie shows, but for many years, it reigned supreme. For multiple seasons, The Walking Dead (TWD) was the most-watched show on television, and for good reason. The series focused on its characters more than the actual zombies, something that 28 Days Later helped revolutionize. Yes, TWD was a zombie show, but it was about the survivors of the apocalypse. In the earliest seasons, every character played an important part, and every death felt impactful on the overarching story in some way.

The zombies were always there, looming in the background as potential threats, but the series thrived because its narrative always prioritized individual character arcs and how the main group survived as a team. Other survivors became a bigger threat than the zombies more often than not, which helped fuel a human-focused narrative within the world of a zombie apocalypse. The series has great actions, loads of gore, lovable characters, and a reputation for insisting that no character is truly safe.

Best of all, fans get to experience the early stages of the apocalypse through the eyes of a man who has no idea what’s going on. Rick Grimes, one of the TWD’s central characters, wakes up alone in a hospital weeks after the outbreak. He has been barricaded in his room, where he’s safe from any potential walkers (zombies) that might wander through. When he wakes up, he has no idea that the apocalypse happened, and his entire goal becomes getting back to his wife and young son. Viewers experience the discovery of a world overrun with walkers through a character who allows them to truly slip into his shoes. This makes the series feel immersive from the very beginning.

The Walking Dead ran for 11 seasons, but it also has multiple spin-offs, including the prequel series Fear the Walking Dead (2015-2023) and multiple sequel series like The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live (2024-Present) and The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (2023-Present). Admittedly, TWD franchise has a lot more competition for great zombie shows now than it did when it first started. HBO’s The Last of Us (2023-Present) comes to mind, as does Netflix’s other zombie series, All of Us Are Dead (2022-Present).

Black Summer, unfortunately, is often overlooked in this discussion, but fans of these series are sure to love it. Not only is Black Summer worth a watch, it’s potentially better than some of the fan-favorite zombie shows out there, even The Walking Dead. Black Summer focuses on a similar premise to the first couple of seasons of TWD. Rose, like Rick, gets separated from her daughter, Anna, and sets out on a dangerous journey to find her. Rose inevitably comes across a small group of survivors and finds herself forced to trust them if she wants to survive long enough to find Anna. Rick is put in a similar situation, especially as he runs into Glenn Rhee and later meets up with a larger group.

Black Summer hits a lot of the same emotional highs that TWD does while still managing to maintain a unique identity. Black Summer even comes out of the gate swinging by introducing Rose, her daughter Anna, and her husband, Patrick, attempting to evacuate the suburbs where they live together. Anna makes it onto a bus evacuating survivors, but Patrick is turned away due to an open wound. Anna is separated from her parents as the truck leaves without them. Patrick turns in the very first episode, which immediately establishes that no one is safe, and the stakes are high. Patrick, now a zombie, nearly bites Rose before being shot by a soldier.

The series has an incredible cast of characters, all of whom come from different backgrounds and have unique motivations and secrets to keep. It doesn’t drag its feet to get into the action, and it establishes its world-building as the apocalypse destroys the world around the main cast. There’s drama, betrayal, and heartbreak from the very first episode, and it’s astonishing to watch. Rose is also a fantastic protagonist who eventually becomes the leader of her small group of survivors. Some fans have even gone as far as to argue that she’s a better leader than Rick Grimes ever was. While Black Summer may not have survived more than two seasons, it accomplishes more in those two seasons than TWD did due to the latter’s slow-burn approach in the first several seasons.