Simon Pegg takes a look at E4’s “Dead Set”

Dead Set was quality fare with solid performances, imaginative direction, good gore and the kind of inventive writing and verbal playfulness we’ve come to expect from the always brilliant Brooker. As a satire it took pleasing chunks out of media bumptiousness but more significantly, the aggressive collectivism demonstrated by the lost souls who waste their Friday nights, surrounding the Big Brother house, baying for the blood of those who beat them inside. Like Romero before him, Brooker simply nudges the metaphor to a literal conclusion and spatters his point across our screens in blood and brains and bits of skull. If he had only eschewed the zeitgeist and embraced the docile, creeping weirdness that has served to embed the zombie so deeply into our grey matter, Dead Set might have been my favorite piece of television ever. As it was I had to settle for it merely being bloody good.

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