'​In the Flesh’ Is The Next Generation Zombie Show We All Need To Be Watching

In the Flesh, which is now streaming on Hulu, originally debuted on BBC Three back in 2013 and gained an incredibly devoted internet fanbase very soon thereafter. It doesn’t take a lot to figure out why it’s so dear to people., In the Flesh was based around one question: what would happen if former zombies were re-integrated into a society they had terrorized when they were unable to control themselves?

Set in the small, fictional British village of Roarton, the undead are referred to as Partially Deceased Syndrome sufferers and injected with medicine designed to restore them to the consciousness they had when they were alive. They hide their condition under layers of makeup and colored contacts, deal with disturbing flashbacks of the harm they caused during The Rising, and face prejudice from their neighbors. At the center of it all is Kieren Walker (Luke Newberry), an 18-year-old boy who is caught in the middle of both extremes: he wants to be a “normal” person, but he identifies with the PDS community he’s apart of, like it or not.

Kieren is a lot of what makes In the Flesh work so well. He acts as a catalyst for the audience — we often find things out at the same time he does — while also being completely three-dimensional. Many of the show’s best moments are silent, introspective scenes where Kieren is alone in his bathroom first thing in the morning, confronted with the reality of his appearance sans cover-up, from his gray skin to his pinprick eyes. He hates himself in a way that feels so familiar it’s obvious it was already deeply set before his death and has only been amplified in his second life. “Honestly, dead, everything up until then was fear,” Kieren says in a tense, pivotal scene in season 2. “Everything. Even when I was alive. Just different levels of fear. And then it’s gone.”

n the Flesh explicitly puts real-world issues at its forefront. By using the zombie condition as a metaphor for mental illness, racism, and queerness — which is made even more poignant by the fact that Kieren is actually gay — it portrays bigotry in a way that hits a bit too close to home. Dehumanization, hate killings, slurs (PDS sufferers are pejoratively referred to as “rotters”), religious extremism, and police brutality (Kieren’s sister is part of the local militia group responsible for hunting zombies) are just some of the ways In the Flesh shows how discrimination can tear a community apart.

The show doesn’t take sides one way or the other, always going to painstaking lengths to show that the extremist PDS sufferers aren’t necessarily in the right either. While Kieren tries desperately to blend in, others choose to revert back to their rabid states in retaliation for the way they are being treated. A scene from the first season’s finale shows Kieren going to visit the parents of a girl he killed in his rabid state, a girl he continues to have vivid nightmares about well into the second season. He explains to them that he was the one who killed their daughter, that he’s “not one of those people that feels that what we did was all right because it was necessary for our survival or that we were somehow an advanced species so killing the living doesn’t count.” He tells them somberly that he would have done anything to stop it. They believe him, and so do we.

Over the course of its short run, In the Flesh did something beautiful: it gave Kieren and his friends a complete arc, something a lot of shows can’t manage with six seasons. Amy, who refers to herself as Kieren’s “best dead friend forever,” was a complete subversion of the manic pixie dream girl trope, surprising the audience with her depth in season 2. Jem, Kieren’s sister, is the show’s answer to untreated PTSD. Even Phillip, Kieren’s neighbor who is part of the local government, could have easily been a one-note clueless villain, but by the end of the series, your heart aches for him too. The fact that In the Flesh managed to do all that with only nine episodes makes it impossible not think about the stories it could have gone on to tell.

In the Flesh was honest in its portrayal of self-acceptance, fear, and the question of whether or not life means anything at all. I miss it, and I hope we somehow, someday get to see it again, in some capacity. Resourceful people coming back from the dead is what In the Flesh is all about, after all.

[Watch In the Flesh on Hulu]