I love zombie texts and abhor reality television. I myself have spent many hours watching the living flee from reanimated corpses in movies and on television. It is no surprise that I really enjoyed Dead Set (2008) a television show about the biggest atrocity of reality television, Big Brother being ripped apart by a zombie apocalypse. Dead Set makes bold statements about the reality television audience – that they passively consume the hyperreality that is presented to them by producers as actuality and are portrayed as the ultimate mindless consumers, flesh eating zombies!
Britain’s BB audience in Dead Set are eagerly awaiting the results of the next eviction from the house, holding up placards, screaming and cheering for their favourites, only to be ravaged by a zombie attack moments later. The audience is now only interested in consuming the flesh of the remaining survivors. The housemates emulate the typical selection of characters from the real BB series, including the producers of the show placing an uneducated bogan type in opposition to a transvestite to create tension in the house.
Dead Set combines the reality television and zombie genres by mixing and matching certain elements from both. The characters consist of the typical asshole producer character that is only comfortable when he controls the situation, Patrick (Andy Nyman), a reluctant hero and disposable production assistant, Kelly (Jaime Winstone) the actual host of Britain’s BB at the time, Davina McCall and the cast playing the housemates that resemble the characters archetypes from any series of BB. The archetypes include Veronica (Beth Cordingly) the blonde bimbo, Marky (Warren Brown) the typical jock alpha male bogan type, Grayson (Raj Ghatak) the transsexual wild card. These archetypes demonstrate the constructed hyperreality of reality television shows, while providing a cast similar to any zombie text.
Dead Set uses this existing mythology surrounding zombies. Frankenstein (1931), the first reanimation of the dead on celluloid portrays Frankentein’s monster as a “working class outsider” (Towlson 2014, p. 38). This portrays an opposition between the masses and the wealthy elite. Venzo (2009, p. 97) points out that because of shows such as BB, the modern working class are now easily able to become television celebrities. Furthermore, Dead Set not only proposes that we should fear the rise of the reality television celebrity, it plays with the generic conventions from traditional zombie texts to make these points.
Dead Set uses existing conventions of both reality television and zombie genres to propose that certain audiences are mindless consumers. The character archetypes presented also reflect these conventions because of the detailed emulation of the BB housemates and the typical inclusion of the reluctant hero and the greedy producer. Dead Set is an example of how generic elements can be manipulated and changed over time.
References
Towlson, J 2014 Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films From Frankenstein to the Present, McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, Jefferson, North Carolina
Venzo, P 2009, ‘Reality Really Does Bite: ‘Dead Set’ and the Development of Reality TV’, Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, No. 163, pp. 92-97
