Dead Set: Our wish to see Big Brother contestants eaten alive finally comes true

Posted by Dan October 6th, 2008 at 12:33pm In General

Because it’s especially fun to introduce you to shows you won’t be able to watch, here’s Dead Set.

Dead Set is a six-episode British series that deals with the big “what if” scenario of zombies taking over the set of Big Brother. The idea — presumably — stems from the fact that Big Brother contestants are sequestered from the outside world with no access to TVs or other media. Thus, they have no concept of world events (like, famously, the 9/11 attacks in the show’s third American season). To make an obvious comparison, Dead Set seems to be part 28 Days Later (complete with digital double-speed film techniques) meets the Blair Witch Project with an amped-up sense of pop culture.

See the trailer below (warning: it’s bloody):

I really like the idea of making a genre series (or movie, or mini-series, or whatever) out of something that is so firmly rooted in pop culture. The best part of any zombie movie or space-invasion movie is seeing how the world we know is transformed by the big event (think of the opening scenes of 28 Days Later when Cillian Murphy’s character is walking around a deserted London). But rooting the zombie movie story around a tangible bit of pop culture — an officially-branded, proper name entertainment staple — adds an extra dimension to work with and makes the idea more realistic.

The down-side to this is that it can all be done really shoddily. You don’t want to see such a big idea fail catastrophically, so it’s always best to have the backing of a major studio.

And even that doesn’t work sometimes. I point you to MTV’s The Real World: The Lost Season — a TV movie based on the premise that a deranged staffer kidnapped the cast members of The Real World: Vancouver. The movie, which feature cameos by Real World alumni, featured a lot of name-dropping and meta reality TV references. It wasn’t necessarily painful to watch (and it was admirable for its ambition), but there was an inescapable sense of gimmickry to the venture.

Perhaps, though, with the amount of blood in Dead Set, you’ll forget about the cheese and high-concept.