Exclusive: The Lowdown on Syfy's Zombie Comedy 'Zeros'
Last week Syfy announced it was developing seven new shows, one of which is the zombie comedy Zeros, a "1/2-hour single-camera satire" about the Zombie Extermination and Removal Operations company (the Zeros), tasked with containing, through "unorthodox methods", the zombie population of Marshall City. I just spoke with a member of the cast, who happens to have starred in another zombie comedy that's near and dear to our hearts -- The Return of the Living Dead. Actor Brian Peck, who played Scuz (pictured above) in Dan O'Bannon's 1985 cult classic, is returning to the genre as a member of Zeros. Find out what he had to tell me about the show after the jump.
"We're a rather ragtag group of zombie exterminators/catchers," Peck tells me. "We shot it in Salt Lake City up in Utah, but it takes place in a fictional big city where there had been a zombie virus outbreak, ala Walking Dead, five years earlier. Their solution to the problem was to wall off a large section of the city, and that's where they keep all the zombies. We're a group that's contracted, and, as soon as a zombie escapes or gets out, we have to go capture them and bring them back behind the wall, or if necessary exterminate them. So we're basically animal control/dog catchers for zombies. It's definitely tongue-in-cheek and rather silly. But it still has cool-looking zombies! And again I found myself in Utah last month doing comedy and zombies. It was great. I was like, 'Wow, here I go again...' We just did the pilot last month, and it will either go nowhere or it will get picked up. I'm obviously hoping it will get picked up. And if it does, we'll go into production some time at the end of the year, early next year. I know they're still editing, finishing up the post-production now. And there's no specific timeline, but the idea is that sometime in the fall we would hear if we were picked up or not... It's a half hour comedy show. It's a sort of handheld pseudo-documentary, shot kind of like The Office or Parks and Recreation. We're not quite as over the top as Reno 911!, but the best description is Reno 911! meets The Walking Dead."
For more on Zeros, check out the show's offical announcement on Syfy.com.
