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.