The idea of the zombie as a shambling metaphor for society’s ills isn’t new. It goes all the way back to George A Romero’s Living Dead movies, where brain-chomping hordes were a stand-in for the ills of unchecked capitalism. The cliche of zombies as horror but with a great big gory subtext is now updated by British lo-fi guru Ben Wheatley, who, in Generation Z (Channel 4, Monday, Tuesday, 9pm), sets ravenous boomers at the throats (literally) of iPhone-addicted kids.
Wheatley’s last project was a honkingly unsubtle adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which he reduced to a psychological horror rubbish heap and then set ablaze. He brings the same four-wheel drive lack of nuance to the absurd Generation Z, which features grannies gobbling down entrails and teenagers more terrified by cyberbullying by their peers than by the pustulant pensioners chasing them through the forests.
The setting is Dambury, an unremarkable small British town where a military convoy carrying a hazardous substance crashes and sheds its virulent cargo. Soon, an infection spreads – though initially, it only affects older people in nearby care homes, beginning with Sue Johnston’s Cecily, Garrick Hagon’s Gabe and Anita Dobson’s Janine.
All in all, life as one of the walking dead proves a mixed blessing. Cecily and the gang are confused at being suddenly ravenous for human flesh – but delighted to have the vigour of youth restored. They certainly aren’t fussed about how their actions impact on others. Without concern for the consequences for the rest of society, they’re soon hunting down and killing their neighbours – an allegory, surely, for the fact that it was older voters who carried the Brexit vote for Britain to leave the EU (and damn future generations).
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The older cast does well, but the young folk they chase through the woods are more sketchily rendered. There is well-meaning but naive incel-type Stef (Lewis Gribbin), who has been led astray by Andrew Tate-style TikToks, his crush Kelly (Buket Kömür) and her on/off ex Charlie (Jay Lycurgo) – all broadly drawn archetypes who never come close to feeling like real people.
Generation Z is desperate to be about more than mere zombies. There’s definitely something to the idea of boomers as the ultimate parasitical generation who stoked the climate crisis and gorged on rising house prices while leaving their grandkids out to dry. At the same time, Wheatley is eager to tap into society’s subconscious guilt about how it shunts old people off to care homes, where they are supposed to be grateful for being benignly forgotten. The show has two conflicting visions of older people and ends up in a muddle.
Wheatley is in his 50s and it’s tempting to infer that he finds both younger and older people baffling and self-absorbed. The kids are too caught up in their own dramas to recognise the world is about to end, and the older ones are happy to destroy society if it means no more dodgy hips. Tellingly, it’s those of his own generation that the writer portrays as the most sensible, and our sympathies are intended to lie with Johnny Vegas and Suzanne Ahmet – playing a duo of worn-down Gen Xers who simply want to be left alone.
To Generation Z’s credit, it pushes the gore factor as far as was presumably possible on Channel 4. There’s loads of spurting blood and distended entrails – red meat for those who like that sort of thing. As a mindless Halloween thrill, it delivers, then – which is probably as well, considering all the muddled metaphors about intergenerational tensions that Wheatley has sent lumbering out in the world. How paradoxical that a drama about the devouring of grey matter by insatiable hordes could do with more brainpower.
