BrainDead

Not that BrainDead isn't bleakly hilarious, to a pee-your-pants-laughing degree, and drive-in-movie creepy. It sooooo is, and it's the show of the summer and possibly of the year. But not since The Werewolf Of Washington popped up during the 1973 summer of Watergate has Hollywood captured the moment's political gestalt with such deadly accuracy.

Character, not concept, drives BrainDead. The Kings have always stacked their deck with talented, scene-stealing stage actors, and that serves both the bombastic, egoistic orators of D.C. and the everyday eccentrics.

A political satire built on such a wacky conceit, it practically demands to be mocked. And yet the show is clever, brisk, and compelling, and it succeeds not by dancing around its inherent weirdness, but by zealously embracing it.

BrainDead is aggressively funny and a little sloppy, and it’s that sick-joke aggression, the refusal to take itself seriously, that is the key to its appeal.

BrainDead comments better than a Sunday morning pundit, moves faster than a New York to D.C. train and never pauses to filibuster.

The genius of BrainDead, an enjoyably offbeat sci-fi/political satire hybrid, is in reminding us that it's possible to have fun without leaving one's brain at the door. [20-26 Jun 2016, p.17]

I’m not sure the whole thing gels perfectly just yet. But BrainDead is still engaging, deliciously weird, and well worth adding to your DVR rotation.

Ridiculous, yes, but also engaging--and maybe some relief for viewers who are preoccupied with politics but could still use a break from cable news. BrainDead is no “Good Wife,” but it does have the Kings’ sense of wit and momentum. It also, to some degree, displays their knack for timely social commentary.

Beneath all of the insanity, BrainDead again and again demonstrates it has a brain in its head. It's goofy-good-time stuff, all right, yet it has a point.

BrainDead is a whole lot of surprising, straight-up-entertaining things over the course of its opening hours but, this summer, it also feels like a no-brainer.

It’s a blend of political satire and semi-campy horror--a darkly comic zombie yarn, a cheeky Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And if the whole season is like the pilot, it might actually be fun.

One of the better things about this series is its ongoing updates via clever Gilligan’s Island-esque sing-along lyrics preceding each new chapter. Better yet is Winstead’s assured, appealing performance as a D.C. tenderfoot thrust into a new world of mystery and political polarization that escalates once those bugs begin infesting and in some cases, exploding the heads of their prey.

The pacing in the early episodes can be uneven, and some plot points you see coming from a long way off. But BrainDead is promisingly original, a deft combination of the tropes of a horror movie, the pace of a forensic drama and the barbs of a political satire that’s thoroughly of the moment.

BrainDead is zippy and witty, a thinking person’s beach read, but there is something not quite enough about the premise. Our political culture is so crazy it is nearly un-satirizable. BrainDead knows this: Its point--not a joke at all--is that a Washington infested with extraterrestrial creepy-crawlies is indistinguishable from a pest-free D.C.

If the series is too schematic and too noncommittal to really function as satire, that doesn't matter much; it’s fun--“The Good Wife” was always the best at its funnest--and Winstead has just the right mix of innocence, intelligence, idealism and pluck for the job. And it functions capably as a monster movie.

It’s an ambitious, almost indescribable series that has fun while feeding into American rage over our government’s partisan mania.

Though no sillier at heart than Under the Dome, Zoo or Extant, the Kings' Washington, D.C.-set BrainDead is sci-fi with a healthy sense of the ridiculous.

Braindead is pretty much completely insane. But in sort of a good way. At least for a while.

BrainDead is an entertaining enough summer distraction through its first three episodes, but it’s no “Good Wife.”

BrainDead moves along at a plucky pace, with the always charming Winstead as an affable and compelling lead, especially as she starts to unravel more about the space bug conspiracy. ... While those aspects work--though they are occasionally too on-the-nose (early episodes were re-tooled to include timely references about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton)--the series’ tone may be divisive.

It serves up all the stuff you’d expect of political satire--the betrayals, the dramas, the jokes at the expense of overeager staffers--but never blends them deftly enough to suggest the deep knowledge that is required to make satire truly scathing.

Ultimately, for a show with a lot of zombie flavoring, BrainDead too often lacks bite.

The Kings deserve credit for taking a risk and not just putting out another legal drama, but if anything BrainDead isn’t weird enough. By hedging its bets, it ends up in an awkward middle ground between straightforward drama and something more original.

BrainDead is, overall, a smartly put-together piece of work, but it lacks the sharp sting of political criticism it seems so ardently to want to burrow into your brain.

Throughout, BrainDead has the goofy-A-student vibe of a particularly saucy public-radio show. The other parts of this mash-up are weaker. The sci-fi plotting is perfunctory. Ms. Winstead is charming, but Laurel is conceived mainly as an audience surrogate, there to roll her eyes for us at the egos in Washington. The pols, like Tony Shalhoub’s boorish Republican senator, are flat characters even before they come down with brain-bugs.

Everything about this new summer show is confounding. Is it horror? Political satire? Slapstick comedy?

The idea and many of the pieces have promise, but as a whole, BrainDead just seems to have gotten away from them.

The subtlety that made [The Good Wife] work is not in evidence here. Nor does this hour demonstrate the sophisticated humor of “Veep,” a better parody that doesn’t need a zombie-like subplot.

Not exactly satire, not exactly horror, BrainDead is not exactly much fun, either.

BrainDead manages to be intermittently intriguing just through the sheer strangeness of its premise not to mention the sparkling chemistry Winstead exhibits both with Tveit and Semine. And in a different series, Pino’s cheerful, adulterous, win-at-all-costs politico could’ve been downright fascinating. Ultimately, though, like the inside-the-beltway white matter that gets consumed by those little alien critters and winds up turning to pink goo, BrainDead goes splat under the weight of its outsized aspirations.

There are enough likable actors and easily digestible bipartisan political jabs here for occasional amusement, but it's sometimes exhausting to watch a show trying this hard for such limited returns.

BrainDead just isn’t funny enough, and is nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. Perhaps in 2016’s truly odd political climate, a show about Capitol Hill being taken over by aliens isn’t extreme enough to work as parody.

While the show shoots for Sorkinesque commentary and the hilarity of “Veep,” it doesn’t come anywhere close to either. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Danny Pino, Aaron Tveit, Tony Shalhoub and other familiar small-screen faces don’t have much to work with, given writing that’s as weak as the excuses offered during high-profile sexting scandals.

It’s less a missed opportunity than entirely misbegotten.

Despite some graphic moments of heads exploding, BrainDead is neither comic nor thrilling.