Dead of Summer

It’s that fuck-it sense of kitchen sink 80’s nostalgia that endears me to Dead of Summer, despite its failings. It’s overkill, but at least it’s trying to be more than the next show down the thriller list on your DVR whose season pass you delete after 2 weeks.

This is not a show that is particularly original; every twist is a cliché, and every character is playing to type. But with so many well-worn at play, Dead of Summer makes for a schlocky hour that never quite gets boring.

Adam Horowitz, Edward Kitsis and Ian B. Goldberg ("Once Upon a Time") created Dead of Summer, and they have paid more attention to the moody atmosphere and opportunities for scares than to the characters--at least, the living ones.

While this new series makes some dubious choices with its characters and setting (Why did it need to be set in 1989?), the premiere of Dead of Summer provided much of what I look for in a summer show--an enjoyable distraction.

This mélange of styles may be intentional, but it fails to cohere into anything amusing or frightening.

The result is a disjointed, absurd and only mildly frightening story that, three hours in, is still flailing more frantically than a teen falling out of a canoe into a lake full of corpses.

After watching a mere two episodes, I felt as though I’d squandered an entire summer watching Dead of Summer, a supernatural/horror/YA drama/soap opera, which starts moldering on Freeform Tuesday night.