Revival, Syfy’s new horror-noir-dramedy thing, is both very much like a lot of shows we’ve seen recently and not.
It is yet another 2025 series about, to paraphrase my colleague’s summary of The Better Sister, two estranged sisters simultaneously bonded and torn apart by trauma — only in this case, the circumstances of their reunion involve the dead suddenly coming back to life. Which might suggest zombie action à la The Last of Us, except these resurrected have no evident interest in eating anyone’s brains, just in returning to their old lives.
Revival
The Bottom Line
An overstuffed but entertaining remix of familiar tropes.
Airdate: 10 p.m. Thursday, June 12 (Syfy)
Cast: Melanie Scrofano, Romy Weltman, David James Elliott, Andy McQueen
Creators: Aaron B. Koontz, Luke Boyce
One of said sisters (Melanie Scrofano’s Dana) is a police detective with a personal investment in the case of a murdered young woman; I’m sure you can fill in your own point of comparison from any number of noir-laced shows here.
None of these tropes is getting radically reinvented here, so much as they are tweaked just enough to keep them from going completely stale. But in combination with a low-key charming cast and an intriguingly sprawling plot, it’s enough to make Revival a diverting distraction.
The adaptation of Tim Seeley and Mike Norton’s comic series hits the ground running. In the opening minutes, a TV interview in a morgue is interrupted when the bodies in the racks (and, gruesomely, the one inside the cremator) begin banging on the walls. This date — Dec. 18, in the pre-iPhone 2000s — will become known as Revival Day, when every person who died in Wausau, Wisconsin, over the previous two weeks was mysteriously resurrected. One month and just a few minutes of screen time later, the town remains under CDC quarantine but out of lockdown orders, freeing residents to resume their normal lives, or whatever could count as such when there are still no clear answers to be found.
Amid this chaos, one of the few level heads belongs to Dana Cypress, a police officer played by Scrofano with an appealing mix of wit, weariness and no-nonsense competency. “Did you talk it to death?” she cracks when a busybody first calls her about a dead horse found on his property. But she’s sharp enough to recognize it as cover for a darker crime, and meticulous enough to see it through. Soon, she’s mired in an investigation that yields seemingly endless questions and precious few answers, with the intermittent aid of her uptight sheriff dad/boss, Wayne (David James Elliott); her drug-addicted little sister, Em (Romy Weltman); and new-in-town CDC scientist Ibrahim (Mrs. Davis‘ Andy McQueen), with whom she strikes up an instant and adorably awkward chemistry.
Creators Aaron B. Koontz and Luke Boyce have a good sense for the insular rhythms of Wausau, and while calling the place cozy might be a stretch, the rotating cast of lightly quirky locals comes to make it feel homey in its own way. The deep bench of recurring characters also helps expand the mystery, since the more people we know, the more suspects there are. The flip side of that equation is that with so many vaguely familiar faces running around, we get to know very few of them well enough to care very deeply what happens to them or the people who ostensibly care about them.
Wausau’s nondescript nature — it’s semi-rural, modestly populated, and neither particularly rich nor particularly poor, which is to say it’s like every other TV small town — makes it an ideal blank canvas for Revival‘s bigger-picture ideas. Some of the Revivers wield their newfound powers of super strength and instant healing with pride, like a punk musician (Gianpaolo Venuta’s Rhodey) who slices himself open during shows for shock value. Many more live in fear, crushed to find themselves shunned by their neighbors, harassed by extremists, targeted by law enforcement. While the series plays those themes of bigotry and oppression with a relatively light touch — Andor, this isn’t — they ground the fantastical premise in a believable reality.
They also help to prop up a narrative that, as of the six episodes of 10 sent to critics, is laden with so many dangling plot threads that the “previously on” segments feel like a lifeline. From scene to scene, Revival might shift between a crime thriller about Dana taking on a vicious family of drug dealers, to a YA romance about Em falling in love with Rhodey, to a horror show about fighting off the deadly undead. Although some of these elements inevitably work better than others, almost none are developed deeply enough to pack a real punch. Even the fractured relationships within the Cypress family, which should be the beating heart pulling all these multiplying subplots together, feel underbaked, paced more according to narrative necessity than organic emotional growth.
If such restlessness renders the show a bit superficial, though, it’s also what keeps it light on its feet — that, and Scrofano’s assured performance, peppered with enough wry little jokes to make Dana feel like a three-dimensional person and not just a hard-charging detective cliché. Revival might not have sufficient bite to leave a mark. But as simply a fun mystery to escape into, familiar enough to be comforting but fresh enough to feel unpredictable, it does what it has to do.