Dead Set as Social Commentary
Warning: If you have not seen Dead Set and intend to do so, do not read this post as it contains spoilers. If you have not seen it this week you can watch the whole thing tomorrow (Saturday 1st) at 10pm on E4.
The rest of this is hidden behind a cut to avoid spoilers for people. And yes, I'm talking about explicit story spoilers.
Dead Set has not disappointed as a decent zombie horror one-shot series, but it is more than that. I'm sure anyone who watched it (or rather I would hope that anyone watched it) could not miss the social commentary in Charlie Brooker's script. This is very downplayed early on such as the moment when one of the Housemates, looking out at a throng of zombies, says: "So does this mean we're not on the telly?" each Big Brother contestant in Dead Set is a parody of the different real life contestants that captured the popular culture imagination, yet this is not from the point of someone who admires such people but reviles them.
Throughout the unfolding story the throng of zombies around the perimeter of the Big Brother studios grows and grows, mirroring the mass of fans that we saw at the start of the show and that Big Brother fans can witness come every eviction night. Here, it seems Charlie Brooker is making a comment about the slavering, mindless masses for whom the Big Brother house for two months a year is Mecca. As the loathsome producer in the penultimate episode is busy carving up a body of one of the dead Housemates, he rants at them and very much becomes the mouthpiece for everyone who hates Big Brother, even though he, the producer of the show, is the most dislikeable character of the entire show. The only truly "heroes" of the show is Kelly who just so happens to work there, but isn't enamoured by her job and her boyfriend who struggles across the country to be with her in a classically doomed zombie horror romance.
In a twisted parody of an eviction, the final episode sees the Housemates discussing murder as though it were an eviction, and the self-destructive nature of the charismaless and self-centred exhibitionist Housemates becomes their ultimate downfall. In a delicious reversal, the employee, Kelly, finds herself in the diary room while the only surviving and only likeable contestant is in the control booth as they make one last exchange.
The final images, however, makes the message all too clear, with the doomed Housemates wandering around now as zombies and as the tragic zombie-Kelly stares out at the world through the still active Big Brother feed to banks of television sets on which the zombies stare back. The mindless watching the mindless.
The reason behind the zombie outbreak is, of course, never given in the tradition of many zombie outbreak stories, but I like to think that Charlie Brooker is trying to imply that it was the mindlessness of reality TV was the cause and what encapsulates this better than Big Brother. As much as it seems Channel 4, once the bastion of independent thinking and alternative television, seems to have good humour at its contribution to the death of creative television with this Halloween satire of what is surly their biggest money earner.