Generation Z, Channel 4
Generation Z, or Gen Z as it is known by the cool kids, is the generation of people born between 1995 and 2012.
With a title like that, you would assume the new Channel 4 series would focus on the post-millennial generation. Don’t be fooled.
Instead it’s a zombie-inspired television comedy drama that delivers horror and flesh-eating pensioners on a grand scale.
It’s bizarre, and yes, I told you not to be fooled.
Written and created by Ben Wheatley, the six-part series is set in the fictional English town of Danbury which soon becomes the epicentre of an absurdly weird chain of events.
It begins with a military vehicle making its way along a series of winding, twisting roads close to the town, before it crashes and overturns with the truck spilling its load.
Appearing to be some sort of chemical leak, the town’s quietness is shattered almost instantly, with the impact felt first at two nearby care homes.
We meet Cecily, played by Brookside and The Royle Family favourite Sue Johnston, and Frank, played by Paul Bentall, who are out for an evening walk when they are overcome by the toxic fumes that are emanating from the crashed truck and quickly filling the air.
Returning to their care home, it’s not long before they change from reserved, shy pensioners into ruthless predators.
Back in her room, Cecily almost immediately becomes a blood-thirsty zombie and so begins, an unlikely and at times comedic, but horrifying episode.
Led by Cecily, the care home pensioners begin to run rampage, savaging the staff and breaking free to find new blood-filled targets to devour.
Strangely, instead of making the elderly care home residents feel ill, the toxic fumes and zombie state have the opposite effect – they gain strength.
They move like a pack of wolves through the forest, searching for prey - everything from walkers to cyclists to animals. Anyone with a dog, particularly a Cockapoo, will want to look away.
The first episode then moves to focus on the younger generation of the town, who are blissfully unaware of what is happening to the older folk.
The young people of Danbury are out enjoying house parties, worrying about relationships and buying drugs from a retired man called Morgan, played by Robert Lindsay, who has a marijuana farm in his basement as well as numerous CCTV feeds and lab equipment, allegedly connected to his activist past.
Yes, it gets more bizarre with each scene.
With the army unable to stop or curtail the angry and fierce crowd of zombie pensioners who are determined to seek out more raw flesh, will it be the young people of the town who have to step in to stop them?
As the numbers keep growing, there’s also Anita Dobson and Johnny Vegas among them too, the plot appears to suggest that the elderly are out for revenge against those in society who have marginalised them.
They take no prisoners - it’s like they have turned back time to when they were in control of their lives, when illness and age was not a barrier.
The series is not for the faint hearted or those who are squeamish.
Away from the gory, blood-filled content and the somewhat funny quips, there is a serious message behind it.
Generation Z is about older people, or the baby boomers - those people born between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s - fighting back.
It is examining the generational divide that exists, the feelings that nowadays there is nothing in common between the old and the young.
But portraying the divide through a gory, zombie satire is perhaps taking it a bit too far.
