Giant Freakin Robot

Good day, streamers. Is everybody ready to watch Nicolas Cage get Left Behind this week? Or would you rather watch Ben Affleck search for his wife, or possibly watch a possessed doll haunt people? Maybe you’d be interested in having a possessed doll haunt Ben Affleck. We’ll see what we can do. In the meantime, check out the five most appealing sci-fi streaming options of the past few weeks.

The Walking Dead: Season 4 (Netflix Instant)
Given The Walking Dead‘s penchant for abusing audiences with an extended midseason hiatus, it’s nice to have the entire fourth season readily available for uninterrupted binging. Relive the Governor’s non-glory days, Carl’s rage-fueled days, Daryl and Beth’s drunken single day, and many more. Season 4 featured some of the most gruesome and shocking deaths that the series has ever delivered — with Carol at the center of some, no less — and it’s only supposed to get worse once Season 5 begins. Just what exactly is Terminus, and why does everything smell like meat around there? The Walking Dead returns to AMC on Sunday, October 12, so get to watching. Or just wait until AMC runs its next marathon.

You probably know this already, but zombies are everywhere. From movies to car and candy commercials to the most popular show on television, the undead are taking over in a totally different kind of way. With the massive success of AMC’s The Walking Dead, you can anticipate some imitators, just don’t expect Syfy’s Z Nation, which premiered this past Friday, to be one of them, at least not according to the guy behind the new show.

Series creator Karl Schaefer recently sat down with Blastr to talk about the various ways his show is different from its big name competitor, their right to exist, and the current zombie phenomenon as a whole.

It’s got to be frustrating for Syfy and Z Nation‘s producers that people can’t talk about the show without inevitably comparing it to that AMC show…you know the one. (And no, we don’t mean Mad Men, although there are some angry male characters in Z Nation.) The clip above is a good example of how tonally different this show is from The Walking Dead. In the latter show, revealing a splattered zombie in a vehicle’s wheel well would probably be presented with a grandiose air of heaviness and retrospect about what it might have taken for a zombie to get into that situation. In Z Nation, it’s more like, “Whoa, there’s a fucking zombie in this wheel well! Check it out!”

Z Nation, which is produced by the D-grade feature churner The Asylum, takes place three years after a zombie phenomenon has left the bulk of this country’s population dead. (Or undead, depending on how they died.) A military man named Hammond (Harold Perrineau) is transporting a man named Murphy (Keith Allan) from one side of the country to the other, because he alone may have the antidote inside of him that could make people immune to zombie bites. When communication goes down, they end up crossing paths with another group of survivors, led by Charles Garnett (Thomas Everett Scott). His squad includes badass Roberta (Kellita Smith), Mack (Michael Welch), Addy (Anastasia Baranova), and the methy Doc (Russell Hodgkinson).

We’re pretty damn excited about many of the shows Syfy has on its development slate. Just over the past year, the network seems to be trying really hard to rehabilitate its image among science fiction fans by developing series such as Ascension, The Expanse, Ghost Brigades, and Childhood’s End. That being said, we’re considerably less sold when it comes to Syfy’s Walking Dead wannabe Z Nation, which premieres this Friday night. Created by Karl Schaeffer (Eureka, Eerie, Indiana), Z Nation stars Lost‘s Harold Perrineau and professional skinny guy D.J. Qualls, and here’s the official blurb from Syfy:

In Z Nation, three years have passed since the zombie virus has gutted the country, and a team of everyday heroes must transport the only known survivor of the plague from New York to California, where the last functioning viral lab waits for his blood. Although the antibodies he carries are the world’s last, best hope for a vaccine, he hides a dark secret that threatens them all. With humankind’s survival at stake, the ragtag band embarks on a journey of survival across three thousand miles of rusted-out post-apocalyptic America.

AMC’s The Walking Dead is a massive hit, consistently bringing in strong ratings and becoming the sort of water-cooler series that’s increasingly rare in our fractured, over-crowded media landscape. It’s understandable that other networks would want a piece of that rotting, maggot-infested pie, and Syfy has declared their intentions to try and take The Walking Dead on head-on with Z Nation, an upcoming zombie series set to star Lost’s Harold Perrineau, among others. Now Amazon has released an extended trailer for Z Nation, and based on what we’ve seen, The Walking Dead doesn’t have anything to worry about.

We’ve had a lot of good things to say about Syfy’s creative decisions in the last year, as the network has genuinely seemed to turn over a new leaf, launching an aggressive and ambitious development slate that includes adaptations of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, and more. There’s also a ton of original stuff in the works as well, including Z Nation, set three years after a zombie outbreak devastates the United States. The new trailer, which isn’t embeddable but which you can see here, introduces the general story arc for Z Nation, with Perrineau leaded a group on a cross-country mission to ferry the only known survivor of a zombie bite to a California lab where a cure may be extracted from his blood.

Perusing the upcoming slate of shows currently in development or production over at Syfy, there are definitely a few popular types of shows that the network hopes to capitalize on. Among others, there’s a clone drama (Clone), a time travel adventure (12 Monkeys), and, of course, zombies. Their upcoming entry into the undead sweepstakes, Z Nation is set to debut this September, and now we have our first good look at the series.

Aside from the bare bones of the story and set up, you don’t learn too much about Z Nation from this trailer. Action and post-zombie mayhem are the key features in this video, that and a zombie baby. You can bet their going to play that card in order to traumatize a character that can’t believe he has to shoot a baby in the head. People seem to have a big problem doing that.