BrainDead

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.