Revival Review 2025 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Uninterested in beating about the bush, Syfy’s Revival opens in the municipal morgue of Wausau, Wisc., where a cadaver bursts from the crematory chamber in a fiery panic. All across town, the dead are rising from their graves — not as zombies, but in perfect, inexplicable health.
Later nicknamed Revival Day, this event comes with its own set of narratively clear but scientifically puzzling rules: Everyone who died within the past 14 days has come back to life, but only in Wausau, an otherwise unremarkable town. The federal government responds by implementing a lockdown and sending in a squad of CDC investigators, but after a month with no answers and no evidence that these “revivers” pose any real threat, there’s increasing pressure for life to return to normal.
While this premise reflects some obvious pandemic-era themes, Revival is actually based on a comic book series that began in 2012, taking place during the 2008 recession. Like the British cult drama In The Flesh — a gritty tale about former zombies struggling to reintegrate into human society — this show uses its sci-fi/horror premise as fuel for everyday social conflict. How do people deal with dead relatives coming back to life? Will the townsfolk accept revivers back into the fold? How will law enforcement handle a public emergency with no precedent, no obvious solution, and no plausible explanation?
Despite its morbid underpinnings, Revival has a light touch, with a quirky ensemble cast who feel closer to Schitt’s Creek than The Last of Us. In the lead, Melanie Scrofano (Wynonna Earp) plays the charmingly scattershot deputy sheriff Dana Cypress, a single mom who was all set to leave town until Revival Day interrupted her plans. Often clashing with her authoritarian sheriff dad (David James Elliott), she winds up investigating a potential murder whose victim is technically still alive, resurrected on Revival Day with no memory of what happened the night before.
With its mix of rural noir tropes and zombie-adjacent horror, Revival won’t win any prizes for originality. Tapping into a roster of well-worn archetypes, Dana and her father are the good cop and the bad cop, balanced out by Dana’s little sister Em (Romy Weltman) as an angsty goth, hiding her rebellious impulses from her overprotective family. In the background we meet a familiar gaggle of local criminals, public officials, and longtime neighbors — the silliest of whom are invariably the best characters, like Letterkenny’s Nathan Dales popping up as Dana’s lazy, incompetent coworker. Whenever the show tries to adopt a serious tone, things rapidly get less interesting because we’ve seen similar ideas handled with more sophistication elsewhere. But when Revival plays into its more comedic side, it’s great.
Specializing in dorky reaction shots and slapstick-tinged action, Melanie Scrofano introduces Dana as a good-hearted person who functions mostly on instinct, barrelling toward her next disaster with minimal consideration of the consequences. This gives her a unique appeal as a romantic prospect, stumbling her way into an adorable flirtation with nerdy CDC researcher Ibrahim Ramin (Andy McQueen). Beaming with morally upstanding goodwill, he has no idea what he’s getting into, signing up for all kinds of Cypress family chaos before they’ve even finished their first date.
Fittingly for its late-2000s setting, Revival has a bit of an old-school vibe. Its writers like to throw a lot of ideas at the wall and leave viewers to worry about what sticks, interspersing Dana’s family drama with subplots about anti-reviver prejudice, organized crime, and smaller mysteries like “What if someone found a bunch of teeth in the woods?” In other words, Revival knows its Syfy audience. This is fast-paced episodic TV with no pretensions of being the next Stranger Things, zipping past its weak points (do we really care about the town’s burgeoning doomsday cult?) on the way to the latest cliffhanger.
While Revival struggles to distinguish itself as a crime drama, that’s hardly a dealbreaker. We’re here for its blend of small-town hijinks and cheerfully morbid supernatural mysteries — and, I’d wager, because a lot of Wynonna Earp fans want to see Melanie Scrofano star in another genre show. Arriving at a time when zombie stories are teetering on the brink between popular and overplayed, Revival benefits from an approach that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
