DAYBREAK REVIEW: YIKES, SHOW ME THE DAY BREAK…

High school is always a tense coalition of tribes, and so it is in Glendale, California, the setting for Daybreak (Netflix). This community has geeks, freaks, mean girls, obnoxious boys and, ruling with cruel fists, the jocks.

And in pops, Josh Wheeler (Colin Ford of Under the Dome), he has a killer origin story. But what separates him from Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, or any of the other dozen teen protagonists who’ve struggled through their own apocalyptic YA stories (yarn, yarn, yarn) that he thinks of his life in terms like “killer origin story.”

Hang on,  we’re processing…

That’s correct: “killer origin story.’

Daybreak is also an extended homage to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, one that puts its reverence for that 1986 John Hughes film on blatant display. From its first Ferris Bueller-inspired moments onward, the new Netflix zombie comedy delivers a self-aware series where the characters are as pop-culture savvy as their audience, maybe too much.

Josh explains that things have been pretty good since the nuclear disaster happened because, effectively, every day is a day off. At one point, he revs up a sports car he inherited. At another, he addresses the camera while sitting in a lawn chair and drinking a daiquiri at Dodger Stadium. “Things move pretty fast in here,” Josh says in a later episode after taking shelter in a new location that’s not entirely ghoulie-free. “If you stop and look around, you might get eaten.”

Sure, the premise of the show is aiming for the teen market where you can binge till your heart’s content, but the latest attempt is a mash-up between comedy, gore, social commentary and completely exhausting for Culturedemandsgeeks to keep up with.

Glendale has been hit by a nuclear bomb set to “basic young-adult dystopia” mode: we’re post-apocalypse now, and the grownups are all bloodthirsty but slow-witted zombies, leaving the mysteriously unaffected kids in charge.

Things are gonna get messy!

Sadly, those things include the show’s world-building, narrative structure and characterisation.

Sure, Daybreak centers on a classic gang of misfits led by Canadian immigrant Josh (Colin Ford). Josh was an outsider at school, albeit one of those tall, witty, handsome outsiders they have in teen dramas. Now he’s free, and on a quest to reunite with his beloved Sam (Sophie Simnett), whom he hasn’t seen since the mushroom cloud went up. Is she alive? Isn’t she alive? kinda thing thread through the entire first season, and yarn.

Daybreak, based on Brian Ralph’s comic and co-created by Aron Eli Coleite (Heroes, Star Trek: Discovery) and Brad Peyton, who directed The Rock’s movies San Andreas and Rampage, and the movie’s central idea — “What would it be like to be a teenager who does whatever he wants without consequences?”

Of course, there are lots of tribes, a big bad, ghoulies, and other things to keep some (people) interested in the show.

POSITIVES:

What Daybreak does have is an excellent cast.

Ford and Simnett make their flashback romance softly sing to the audience’s heart, as clumsy everyman Josh worships dream girl Sam.

Austin Crute brings humanity and sass to the plain weird role of Wesley, a former bully who is now a, er, pacifist samurai And of course, Angelica (Alyvia Alyn Land), a 10-year-old homeschooled wild child. (“As far back as I can remember,” she announces in episode three, quoting directly from GoodFellas, “I always wanted to be a gangster.”) The three of them start to band together and, in a nearby shopping mall, potentially build their own community. For Culturedemandsgeeks, Alyvia Alyn Land is the standout star of the post-apocalyptic show.

Matthew Broderick is a no-brainer choice as the school principal whose meekness hides fierce cunning. Krysta Rodriguez plays Ms. Crumble, a teacher whose incomplete zombification means she’s still an ally to the kids.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

While trying to throw so much at the audience; Energetic, imaginative, visually bold and yet so, so… boring because none of the pyrotechnics are anchored to any logic. Daybreak has nothing to add to the high-school canon – its take on teenagers’ inner lives is brutishly unsophisticated compared to, say, Sex Education or The End of the F***ing World. And the thing about Daybreak, though, is that it never feels as though anyone is experiencing real desperation. The series adopts an irreverent tone and distances itself completely from the tragedy of a bomb having been dropped on the United States

2/5 STARS