Rural noir Revival is heavy on drama and light on thorny questions

Syfy brings the engrossing horror comics series to life.

By Jarrod Jones | June 9, 2025 | 7:00am

Photo: Mathieu Savidant/Lavivier Productions/SYFY

TV Reviews Revival

Rural noir Revival is heavy on drama and light on thorny questions

The dead walk the Earth—or at least Wausau, Wisconsin—in Revival, the new Syfy series created by Aaron B. Koontz and Revealer director Luke Boyce that’s based on the engrossing, 47-issue Image Comics yarn. This ten-episode season streamlines the comics’ rural-noir trappings with televisual pop and burdens its installments with a tottering dramatic structure that leaves only a teensy bit of space for the small-town idiosyncrasies found in distant spiritual cousins like Twin Peaks or Northern Exposure. The show gestures at the source material’s intriguing premise—basically, Fargo meets The Walking Dead with a smidge of The Leftovers—but mutes its potential, re-engineering a strong idea into a modestly thrilling TV show.

Unlike many of its peers, Revival starts strong and only improves (at least over the six episodes provided to critics). The premiere quickly establishes its crackerjack premise, introducing a town upended by “Revival Day,” a social catastrophe where everyone who died two weeks before the event suddenly jumps back to life, their personalities intact and bodies endowed with strange new abilities like an instant-healing factor and super-strength. Loved ones emerge from graves and morgues (one just seconds after the cremation chamber ignites) as if nothing happened, unchanged except for these few supernatural quirks and, in some cases, uncharacteristic aggression.

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For local cop Dana Cypress (Wynonna Earp‘s Melanie Scrofano, who’s terrific here), Revival Day couldn’t have come at a worse time. Her story begins as she tries to escape, leaving behind her job and sheriff father, Wayne (David James Elliott), in search of a better life for herself and her son, Cooper (Hudson Wurster). With one foot out the door, Dana is forced back to town due to a citywide quarantine that keeps the citizens of Wausau, whether alive or revived, stuck in place. Compelled by her harried dad to stay and investigate a “Reviver”-related crime, Dana is paired with Dr. Ibrahim Ramin (Andy McQueen), a CDC researcher whom she had previously tried to hook up with in her squad truck. As Wausau boils over with fear and resentment among the living, Dana and Ibrahim attempt to navigate their romantic awkwardness. (They’re cute, as is much of this show.)

At the heart of the series is Dana’s relationship with her younger sister, Em (Romy Weltman), a withdrawn and troubled twenty-year-old whose drug use, depression, and thick eyeliner mark her as the family black sheep. Em becomes a wild card in the unfolding mystery, her impulsivity forcing Dana to realize just how thoroughly broken their family unit is. Or, as Em’s spaced-out roommate Kay (played by a wonderfully deadpan Maia Jae Bastidas) puts it: “Sounds like you don’t know your sister, lady.” This sentiment resonates throughout the season as Em attempts to right past wrongs, much to her sib’s chagrin.

Revival does a nice job leaning into the unsettling normalcy of its premise. Once lockdown lifts, the dead reenter society, attending school, going to yoga class, and, in one awkward sequence, swinging by a funeral. Breaking from the typical zombie formula, the dead aren’t shambling monsters but individuals with messy problems. While the series is often amped up with lens flares and stylistic choices more suited to a mid-budget horror movie (fitting, given its pedigree, but distracting), the provincial, close-knit charm of Wausau occasionally peeks through as a cozy Midwestern ground zero ripe for the Rapture. And thought is given to the lasting consequences of the dead’s return, with one clever bit showing a Reviver smashing a mirror with their fist. The hand heals, but the mirror remains shattered—and the symbolism is impossible to miss.

Sure enough, as the season progresses, the townspeople’s unease deepens, especially after a Reviver violently lashes out and kills a member of the living. Stoking the anti-Reviver flames is Blaine Abel (Stephen Ogg), a junkyard operator and AM radio crank who assembles a militia of dudes convinced the apocalypse is nigh. Ogg plays Blaine with sneering conviction—his character calls Revivers “demons,” and his slack-jawed followers nod in agreement—though Blaine remains in the periphery, a populist threat that looms more than instigates.

Blaine’s rhetoric, in contrast to that of his more levelheaded social opponents, serves as the foundation for the series’ occasionally didactic commentary. Dana grapples with how to speak around Revivers without “othering” them, worrying about saying things like “That’ll kill me” or casually using the word “zombie.” Sheriff Wayne, less concerned with tact, suggests detaining Revivers in camps until the town completes a full threat assessment. This troubling (and resonant) response gets pushback from Ramin and the mayor (played by Conrad Coates), prompting Wayne to reevaluate his moral compass and the show to wade further into the murky political waters with him. (One plot thread follows a ruthless CDC experimenting on Revivers using methods that resemble torture tactics.)

As it presents Revivers as stand-ins for marginalized populations subjected to intolerance and institutional abuse, the show also dances around the profound implications that its premise invites regarding the soul and the afterlife. This is fertile ground, and Revival tiptoes over it in favor of a soft allegory. Profundity may be outside this series’ purview, but if there was ever a time to unpack the religio-philosophical implications of reanimation, wouldn’t it be now? In adapting Revival for the small screen, Koontz and Boyce dutifully hit all the right dramatic notes while breezing past the heft of its ideas.

Revival premieres June 12 on Syfy