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.
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…
