Inside a jammed police station, a woman gestures toward the teenage girl next door — black clothes, goth makeup — and wants to know whether she’s one of the risen dead.
“That’s Tina — she just likes The Cure,” says an exhausted Dana Cypress.
That one exchange sums up nearly everything about Revival, which is now streaming on Netflix following its 2025 run on Syfy. It’s a zombie series that finds the humor in being a zombie series, while treating its family drama and its wounds with real weight.
The town where the recently dead get up and walk home
Created by Aaron B. Koontz and Luke Boyce and adapted from the comic series by Tim Seeley and Mike Norton, Revival unfolds in Wausau, Wisconsin — a small town that becomes a national story overnight when the recently deceased return to life. Some climb calmly out of their graves in search of family. Others come to inside the incinerator, screaming.
The phenomenon is christened Revival Day, and what follows is a media frenzy plus a government-enforced quarantine, as health experts and authorities scramble to figure out what happened.
Dana (Melanie Scrofano) is a divorced cop who has spent her whole life trying to escape Wausau. She’s wrapping up a move to Chicago with her son (Hudson Robert Wurster) and waiting on a transfer approval when the dead wreck her exit strategy. Complicating things further, her boss is her father, the town Sheriff (David James Elliott) — the guy you’d want next to you in a crisis, and the last guy you’d want around 24 hours a day.
Now every case she picks up carries a fresh wrinkle: the culprit may not be among the living.
The Revivers are mostly fine, which is the unsettling part
Around Wausau, plenty of residents wrap their arms around loved ones they’d just buried. Plenty of others brace for the other shoe to drop. At school, a revived girl gets tagged “zombie girl” by classmates who keep their distance whenever no one is looking.
The majority of Revivers are peaceful and simply want their old lives back — which doesn’t make them normal. Cuts and life-threatening injuries won’t stick. One elderly woman’s teeth drop out and regrow inside of a minute. A few pick up supernatural abilities, extraordinary strength among them.
And a few return wrong — aggressive, untethered from reality.
Overcrowding is the perennial problem with paranormal procedurals. The X-Files, iZombie, decades’ worth of them: some for the hardcore horror sickos, others for viewers who just want spooky vibes and strong character dynamics. Revival carves out its place by approaching the formula from an angle.
It owes as much to The Leftovers as it does to Romero
The gore shows up and it delivers. But what really occupies Revival is how an inexplicable event reshapes a community — the same territory The Leftovers worked. In Wausau, some residents are still waiting on their own dead to wake, and they’ll do ugly things to speed it along: pulling a body out of the ground and carrying it home, or shutting a terrifyingly behaved Reviver in the barn and acting as though nothing has changed.
The reason it justifies 10 episodes, though, is the Cypress family. Every installment strips away another layer of backstory that clarifies why these people treat one another the way they do.
Scrofano, a dependable fixture of Canadian TV, makes Dana both resourceful and immature, never more watchable than when she’s making a rash call to close a case. Her sickly younger sister Em (Romy Weltman) returns home from a rough college stint, hauling tension and misunderstandings with their father along with her. Around Dana she’s prickly and slightly remote — and also loving and protective.
None of it gets rushed by the writers. Episodes end with you turning over what fractured these relationships, and whether the damage can be undone.
Season two isn’t a sure thing
Season one aired last year, and whether a second gets ordered remains unknown. Koontz suspects the Netflix numbers may settle it.
“We have always believed there is a much bigger audience out there for this show,” he said. “The response from the people who found Revival on Peacock was incredible, but Netflix gives it an entirely new life.”
And if you refuse to start a show without a guaranteed ending, rest easy: the finale resolves the first season’s murder mystery.
Revival is built on B-movie schlock bones — brisk pacing, funny dialogue, gory thrills — yet it devotes equal effort to how a town processes the impossible and to the family at the center of it. It has its cake and eats it too.
Revival is streaming on Netflix.