Cast: Melanie Scrofano, David James Elliot, Romy Weltman, Andy McQueen, Katharine King So, Hudson Wurster, Stephen Ogg, Release Year: 2025

Where To Watch: SyFy/Peacock

Audio Description Produced By: diffuse

Written By: Narrated By:

What Is it? A sleepy town is changed overnight when, inexplicably, everyone who has died in the last few days is revived.This naturally causes a lot of questions about why, and also for public safety. Some are happy to see their friends and loved ones return, and others not so much. But are the revived hiding secrets?

What Works: Well, the premise is cool, if it was handled with care. it is the kind of potential that the right creative team could actually do something with, but sadly, this team has no idea what to do with it. I liked the premise, and it seems as if those who are involved like it too. There’s a valiant effort to create characters we might like, and a story full of lore. The problem is, they have been given a shoestring budget to achieve this, since NBC/Universal has no faith in anything designed for SyFy anymore. They would have been better off just designing it for Peacock, and allowing it to have a run later on SyFy, something ABC has done with Only Murders In The Building, and WBD has also done with Hacks.

What Doesn’t Work: Aside from the next chapter here, which discusses the budget audio description, and Peacock’s inability to even commit to cheap audio description, the series is just so cheap. It feels hokey, and the biggest star hasn’t led a successful series since JAG. revival is worried about being too smart, so it often plays to the lowest common denominator, figuring anyone who still has cable and not a streaming service must be an idiot. The quality is nowhere near the rest of the current NBC/Peacock/Universal talent, and feels like an independently produced show on Tubi.

the acting is hit or miss, with most people just happy to be here. It reminded me of another show I was watching on SyFy a while back, that took place in space and has since become forgettable. that cast had a tiny handful of charmers, and some winning plot points, but mostly suffered from being the victim of sacrifice to keeping SyFy alive. It is a shame, because they just cancelled resident Alien,a fairly decent show that started on SyFy, and eventually earned its wings to move to USA. Chucky worked as a SyFy series because it was intended to be campy.

This plot is something that if you handed it to a talented showrunner like JJ Abrams, Jonathan Nolan, or the Duffer Brothers, you would likely have a big hit. Unfortunately, no one at this conglomerate can see the forest through the trees.

The Audio Description: Abysmal. Diffuse is who you hire when you want cheap audio description done fast. They are standing outside Home Depot waiting to be hired for any random job, no questions asked. There’s so little care put into this track, that there are moments where the characters are having a conversation about something they can see, but we can’t, and the writer for the audio description is so bad at their job they can’t even process it. I remember one scene where one of the lead actresses was sitting down to watch her father on TV, which was clearly a secondary importance, and we could hear these gurgling noises like you’re in a horror film, but you have no visual connection to why the sound effect is happening. I still have no fucking idea what was happening. Then, after four episodes, NBC/Peacock seemingly just abandoned the concept of audio description. After waiting more than enough time, and being degraded and debased by this offensive excuse of accessibility, I asked myself what I was even waiting for? So I can stumble through more episodes of a show with no budget, and an eve worse audio description track? no thanks.

Why You Might Like it: I hear the comic on which this is based is good, and I’m not fighting the premise at all. But, this is a little like getting the rights to Batman and asking Francis Ford Coppola if he’d like to follow up Megalopolis with his take on the caped crusader.

Why You Might Not Like it: it’s so underfunded, it is like DOGE took a detour and cut the budget for Revival, and made them work even cheaper than they would normally have to for a SyFy production. Honestly, i gave a rotten review to Marshmallow this year, due in part to the lack of accessibility, and that film felt better funded and directed than this show.

final thoughts: A great concept is murdered by inept writing, disappointing casting, and a seeming desire on the part of SyFy and peacock to intentionally provide us with equally cheap and awful audio description. In a world where you get what you pay for, revival had the money to buy cinnamon Twists at Taco Bell, and nothing more.

Rotten: 3.4/10