The first season of Netflix’s new zombie series, ‘Black Summer’, is now available to stream. The series serves as a prequel to Syfy’s ‘Z Nation’, which ran for five seasons and was only recently canceled. Jaime King stars in ‘Black Summer’ as the main character Rose, and also serves as a producer. Within the first minutes of the first episode, Rose finds herself separated from her daughter and discovers that her husband has succumbed to this mystery plague that is sweeping the population. But while this is a far-out zombie series, it draws inspiration from the real world and recent headlines, and that’s part of what drew King to the project.
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Speaking to ComicBook.com, she stated:
“What I loved about the script is that immediately when I read it, I couldn’t breathe. It felt like I was reading something that would happen on the news in real life. It felt like the overwhelm of our country in America and everything that we’ve been dealing with, that this was in the story. When I read the scene when I get ripped away from my child, I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ And it was happening right when kids were getting separated from their parents at the border. There are all of these very strong and clear symbolic tie-ins in our script, in all of them, that were deeply personal to what’s going on in the world right now.”
She also compared the evacuation sequence to what it must have felt like to outrun Hurricane Katrina. The element of a mother fighting for her child is also an element that drew King to ‘Black Summer’. “As a mother who has been through so much with her children, it was a love letter to them. It was a love letter to the strength of what it meant to be a mother and that there’s nothing that we will not do for our children.”
And it seems that in this regard, she was on the same page as the show’s creator John Hyams.
“I think we spoke for eight hours, and I was like, ‘Tell me, why did you write this?’ And he’s like, ‘I wanted to write a love letter to my wife, and to the strength of what I saw her go through when she was pregnant with our first child. And I always wanted to do that.’ And then Trump got elected, and he was enraged by the stuff that he was seeing, as many are. And the injustices and the way that the very fabric of who we are as a nation is being ripped apart through hatred and not listening to each other, and not understanding and having to pick sides. That’s what this show is about.”
Here is the synopsis for the series:
Set in the dark, early days of a zombie apocalypse, BLACK SUMMER stars Jaime King as Rose, a mother torn from her daughter who embarks upon a harrowing journey to find her. Thrust alongside a small group of American refugees, these complete strangers must find the strength they need to fight their way back to loved ones. But in order for Rose and her team to brave this hostile new world, they will need to make brutal decisions to contend with zombies – and each other.
Season 1 of ‘Black Summer’ is now available to stream on Netflix.
