At this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, those in attendance were treated with insights into Netflix’s new spin-off series of SyFy’s Z Nation, Black Summer. The series, which is set to star Jaime King, will feature a much darker take on the zombie apocalypse than it’s parent series.
Image via SyFy
The streaming giant is no stranger to taking an established series and putting their own spin on things — just take the much-anticipated Riverdale spin-off, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. With regards to Black Summer, fans of the long-running parent series will be treated to a classically dark, zombie-fied scare fest with this incarnation; something I cannot personally wait for! Schaefer, the series creator, said, “Black Summer is before the apocalypse got weird and was just scary.”
King will play a mother who was torn away from her daughter and in desperate need to find her, providing much of the main storyline. What’s interesting to note is that the eight-episode first season will be told in one overarching narrative, straying away from an episodic nature (read: ideal for a weekend binge). There is no word on if the prequel series will play into the shocking season four finale of Z Nation, in which some military-esque elements were introduced to tease the fifth season.
Image via SyFy
Created by showrunners Karl Schaefer and John Hyams, it remains to be seen what elements the show will take from the Black Summer prequel comic, which is described as “[a] prequel set in the world of Syfy and Asylum’s #1 scripted hit zombie series Z Nation, Black Summer is as bad as the apocalypse gets. A worldwide drought and famine when most of the surviving population dies and turns zombie. As the remnants of humanity cling to existence, fan favorite Charles Garnett returns to send a new team on a desperate new mission: Retrieve a possibly untouched cache of the food substitute Soylent Z from Galveston, Texas. But when mission leader Israel Johnson and his small team arrive in Galveston, they’ll face a threat unlike anything ever seen before in the zombie genre.”
