Z Nation Producer: “We’re Different Than The Walking Dead”

A new zombie apocalypse TV series debuted last night.  Z Nation is is a post-apocalyptic television series created by Karl Schaefer and Craig Engler, which airs on SfFy.  Now obviously people are going to do the obvious and compare this to The Walking Dead.  Is there even a difference?

Series producer Karl Schaeffer thinks so.

I think the biggest difference between us and them is that our series has a sense of hope and also a sense of humor.  We’re trying to put the fun back into zombies.  Our heroes have a mission that they’re on, so we’re traveling every week.  We’re going across the country.  They’re not just fighting for survival and hunkering down into one place.  They really have somewhere to go and something to do.  Our characters aren’t afraid of zombies, necessarily.  They’re wary of them, and zombies are certainly dangerous to them, but they take the fight to the zombies.  We try and have as much action in an episode as The Walking Dead has in half a season.  There’s a lot of black humor in our show and a lot of social satire, but primarily there’s a sense of hope and mission, and the characters are really taking it to the zombies, as opposed to being afraid of them and hunkering down.  If you were going to go through the apocalypse, I think you would rather go through the apocalypse with our guys because they’ve got somewhere to go and something to do.  I think it’ll be triumphant, in the end.