With zombies medicated, rehabilitated and given cosmetics to make them look a bit less obviously dead, In the Flesh follows one young zombie as he returns to his Lancashire community and deals with the consequences of the outbreak. It uses the genre to provide useful metaphors for coming out and mental health struggles, mixed with political comment on bigotry and intolerance.
Utopia (2013)
Stream on: BritBox (UK & US); Prime Video (US)
If I had a pound for every time a cult British sci-fi series had a main character falsely accused of molesting children in its first episode, I’d have two quid. Which isn’t much, but it’s weird it happened twice. From Dennis Kelly, the writer of Matilda: The Musical, Utopia is, above all, extremely Channel 4. It is blackly comic, mysterious, and constantly wrong-foots its audience from scene-to-scene and moment-to-moment.
Its cast, including Misfits’ Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Alexander Roach and Adeel Akhtar, play the kind of unpleasant, messed up people you immediately want to protect from all bad things. Meanwhile, Neil Maskell’s villain shows how effective it can be to just have a character walk around killing people.
You are probably best going into Utopia without much idea as to the actual plot, but suffice to say the plot threads about imminent pandemics and vaccine conspiracy theories definitely feel a lot more on-the-nose today than they did ten years ago. If you’ve managed to go this long without watching it, it’s a great time to go back and catch up without anyone spoiling it for you.
Humans (2015)
Stream on: BritBox (UK); Hoopla (US)
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