Initially I was not at all excited about Black Summer because honestly, the zombie genre had been done to death by the time it came around. The Walking Dead had done it about as well as it could be done and after 2,000 zombie movies I was pretty sick and tired of it.
I watched it anyway because I am a glutton that spends entirely too much time watching Netflix. I don't consider this a problem, yet.
Anyway, Black Summer has all the workings of a good show but it suffers from some very serious flaws that make it impossible for me to enjoy it and they exist in every single episode that I have seen.
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First off I want to talk about something that was definitely intentional, could have been a strength for the show, but ended up being a massive weakness in my mind and the minds of many others that have watched this show.
The lack of linear structure
The show is not done in a linear fashion and honestly, I don't have a problem with that as long as the story comes together in a cohesive manner. The show isn't really a show as much as it is a bunch of snippets that are thrown out there in a seemingly random order. This works for the show in certain situations such as a big event that ends up being told from the perspective of multiple people in it such as when a raid on this country home was happening between rival gangs. That was interesting and more information was revealed with each piece of the puzzle.
Unfortunately that instance is rare where the "pieces" actually end up coming together. For the most part the new "scene" has a vague name like "Sam" or "breakaway" or something that doesn't seem to have much to do with zombies or the story at all. Because it jumps around like this I can honestly say that I only know the name of a handful of the characters despite the fact that I have watched 8 episodes. This jumping doesn't give us very much time to actually give a shit about many of the characters and in that regard I think it is a mistake.
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These people are all core members of the cast and they get split up at the beginning of season 2. They are referred to by their names so infrequently that I don't know what the hell their names are off the top of my head. I'm not saying that it is necessary to know their names but honestly, the way the story jumps around so abruptly makes it difficult to actually give a shit about any of the characters at all.
However, this flaw in storytelling is a minor setback compared to something that really gets under my skin.
The impracticality of glass windows meaning safety
I don't know how many times this has happened in the show, but it seems like it is a lot.
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This places is just referred to as the manor and for some reason, that isn't explained at all, it is where all the remaining humans wish to reside. They fight over it, kill one another in droves for possession of it even though the place is huge and could house all of them easily, but there is one major flaw of considering this a wonderful stronghold: The entire bottom floor is basically windows all around.
There have been a ton of times when people were trying to get inside because they were being pursued by the undead and they are banging on the window covered doors which are right next to a massive row of floor to ceiling windows and nobody seems to be capable of breaking them down. Not zombies or regular people are capable of i dunno, throwing a stone, swinging a piece of wood or just leaning on the windows a bit.
This would bother me less if it wasn't for the fact that in other situations there are zombies breaking through glass on this same show. It happens quite regularly in fact. An entire couple of episodes centers around the fact that there is this one rather fast zombie that is always in the yard of this manor and constantly banging on the wooden front door hard enough to nearly break the door down... yet he never goes for the windows.
There are other things like this in the show such as zombies being incapable of using doorknobs and what not that is never explained. I don't like impractical aspects to be in shows like this and in that regard Walking Dead and even stupid Resident Evil did it much better. If the place wasn't fortified, it wasn't safe and that is really the only thing that makes sense.
Why are the humans fighting each other?
I'd like to think that if we were at a point where zombies are always after us that we, the non zombies, might make some effort to band together and increase our numbers but the way it is in Black Summer is that the humans are only interested in stealing from and killing all other humans that remain.
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I get it ok, there needs to be a non-zombie group of bad guys in order for the show to stay fresh. You may recall that Negan Smith's character was extremely popular in The Walking Dead and it was far more interesting than just always running away from mindless zombies. Black Summer is trying to do this as well but they are doing a very poor job of it. Once again I do not know the name of the leader of the baddies and their motivations for killing without so much as an inquiry again, isn't explained in any way. They just turn up, kill people, and also end up losing a bunch of their own numbers in the process. This seems like a really bad business idea because eventually you are going to run out of members.
There are many other problems with this show that perhaps I will go into greater detail about at a later time. Honestly, this show could be great but as it is now I watch it only to make fun of it and point out mistakes they made and trust me....there are a lot of them.