You Should Be Watching: Daybreak
What happens when you combine Zombieland with John Hughes and add a little bit of Mean Girls? Are you interested? Welcome to You Should Be Watching, where we understand there is simply not enough time in the day to consume the absolute onslaught of content coming at you from cable, premium cable, and online streaming services. It can drive a man crazy! We do the work so you don’t have to and today we’re looking at what happens when high school drama meets the zombie apocalypse. Welcome to Daybreak.
Daybreak is a somewhat new streaming series on Netflix that focuses on the survivors of a nuclear blast in California. For whatever reason in the aftermath adults who were not killed in the blast have now turned into what the teens call “ghoulies” (a Bulletproof Action favorite in its own right). The show pulls heavily from Hughes’ DNA with characters breaking the fourth wall Ferris Bueller style to the various factions based on high school types like in The Breakfast Club, even Matthew Broderick himself plays the school principal. The way the show takes typical pop culture archetypes of high school and then cranks them to 11 behind the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse is an entertaining exercise. For instance what if the jock football team also became testosterone-filled savages straight off Fury Road, the Cheerleaders and pretty girls who are called the Disciples of Kardashian. All the stereotypes of high school cliques are put through this exercise and spit out the other end. The show reminds me of the “combine two formulas” approach a show like Deadly Class took comparing modern-day high school navigation with an elite assassin school.
Our main protagonist is the modern-day average every man Josh Wheeler who is played by Colin Ford (Under the Dome). His character is your average slacker who now can do whatever he wants in the desolate world. As the average middle of the ground character, he is the eyes with which we experience the world but also neutral enough o interact with all the relevant parties. Naturally, he slowly adopts his own group of misfits that didn’t quite fit into the other groups, like an African American Samurai Football player and a wannabe gangster. Together they set up shop in an abandoned strip mall and attempt to navigate the school cafeteria world with their table in the back corner by the garbage cans. The show doesn’t do much to explore what state the rest of America is in or even the events leading up to the strike and that is perfect. Playing off the high school motif the idea that nothing else in the world matters and is more important than what is right in front of these kids at this moment is something anyone who survived those years can relate to. Who cares about the world ending when your crush is over there with the Jocks!!!
Let none of this distracts you though from the fact that the show is very violent and graphic with limbs being chopped off and maggots being eaten. It’s ultra violent and takes liberties it can only pull off in the Post-Apocalyptic setting. I am always a fan of shows that manage to reinforce and also deconstruct typical conventions of entertainment at the same time. The show toes the line well of when to lean into the stereotypes and when to break them. It’s a mish-mash hodge-podge of genres but I feel like what comes on the other end was entertaining and endearing much in the way a movie like Mean Girls was to those who are years removed from the drama.
We take our recommendations very seriously here at the You Should Be Watching desk and hopefully, we find some shows that flew under your radar but the first episode of Daybreak sets the tone well if your not into it after that no harm but you just may find a new show to lose a weekend to. It could be worse right? It could be the apocalypse then what would we watch?
