Dead of Summer is just the latest in an increasingly long line of TV shows most people will never find the time to watch. It airs on a network with a completely bullshit name (Freeform, formerly ABC Family) and a very specific target audience ( 18-to-34-year-olds). At this point, it is the fourth slasher series to hit TV in the past year, following MTV's Scream, Fox's Scream Queens and Super Channel/Chiller's rather unimaginatively named Slasher. If not for Slasher's unmistakable Canadian TV production values, Dead of Summer would easily look like the cheapest of the bunch. It's not especially scary, unless we're talking about the quality of some of the acting. It's...
Actually, it's not half bad because it doesn't quite do what you'd expect. You think you know exactly what this show is at the start of the pilot, and by the end they've thrown just enough of a curve to earn your attention, probably more so if you've come to it as a fan of the horror genre in general and have the patience to get through the inevitable teen romance shenanigans (one episode in and there are already at least two love triangles set up). As it is, I've only seen the pilot, and here's the important stuff:
Premise: It's 1989, and a haunted summer camp is nearing its grand re-opening. Eight counselors, almost all of whom once attended the camp together as kids, use the three days before the opening to mostly flirt and haze the new girl, but then a dead body pops up. Ki-ki, ma-ma, right?
The Cast: Alex (Ronen Rubinstein), Blair (Mark Indelicato), Jessie (Paulina Singer), Joel (Eli Goree), Cricket (Amber Coney), Blotter (Zachary Gordon), Drew (Zelda Williams) and Amy (Elizabeth Lail) are the counselors, and Deb ( Lost 's Elizabeth Mitchell) is the mysterious new owner who knows exactly what she's doing when she stands half-naked in her window for one of the horny counselors to see.
How It's Just Like Friday the 13th: The opening scene establishes that something terrible happened at the camp in the past, and now it's re-opening. All of the characters initially seem like 80s slasher movie cliches, instantly recognizable by their behavior and dress as fitting into a specific stereotype (e.g., the jock, the stoner, the cheerleader, the slut, etc.). There's a spooky old man who warns them of impending doom, and a virginal main girl who clearly functions as the final girl candidate. There's a scary story moment of all the counselors sitting around a fire.
How It Differs From Friday the 13th: For starters, it's set in 1989. Oh, look at the giant boom boxes, neon clothes, pulled up collars and, oddly, that giant issue of Rolling Stone with Michael Keaton as Batman on the cover which one of the counselors always seems to be reading in her spare time. Also, listen to the period-specific R.E.M and Guns N' Roses songs. To be technical about it, though, the slasher craze had almost completely played itself out by '89. Even Jason Voorhees had moved on from hunting camp counselors. He was scaring people in Times Square in Jason Takes Manhattan that year. As such, Dead of Summer is playing on slasher conventions, but doing so in a year in which the world had already moved from the genre.
That's kind of a neither here nor there thing, though. It doesn't really matter. It's just something that will jump at you if you know your slasher history. There are other, more substantive ways Dead of Summer departs from Friday, such as its far more diverse cast, including several characters of color and another who's openly gay (and everyone's totally cool with it).
The more notable point of departure, though, is that by the end of the pilot Dead of Summer is still lacking a central baddie, although Tony Todd's tall man from the cold open flashback will surely have a say in things. In fact, Dead of Summer probably shouldn't even be called a slasher story. Instead, this is like a haunted house movie that just happens to be set at a summer camp.
Here's how Ian Goldberg described the show in a THR interview:
It's a show about identity. There is a supernatural component to it and a lot of the scares come from the secrets that these characters are bringing with them to the camp and how those secrets manifest in really creepy ways. The way we talk about it is like how people go to the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. There are real demons there and there are also your inner demons that manifest. We just thought there's kind of an audience expectation when you do a summer camp horror show or movie that it's going to be Friday the 13th with a killer in a mask who's just going to be hacking people up. We wanted to take that expectation and twist it and do something much more character-based and unsettling from a psychological point of view.
This is accomplished in the pilot through Amy, the shy new girl whose awkward attempts to make friends with the counselors is echoed in the flashbacks to her starting her senior year at a new high school and struggling to fit in. By the end of the pilot, the flashbacks pay off with a tragic ending, and the resulting ghost is now haunting her at the camp (or we think...no one else sees it but her). Similarly, another one of the counselors sees something for a moment which no one else does, and various bombs are dropped in the final moments, heavily hinting that Amy's not the only one with a tragic backstory which will be filled in through flashbacks.
The trick is ultimately whether or not you care enough about these characters to stick around to see them turned into something more than mere cliches. I don't know if I do, but I'm betting that once the entire season has aired Dead of Summer will make for a fun, mindless binge watch, one which causes you to think, "Wow, this freakin' show just keeps getting crazier and crazier."
I left out the most important part, though. Considering Freeform's target audience, the most crucial thing to know about Dead of Summer is probably this: Cute boys! Specifically that deputy who has a thing for Amy:
