When all the people who recently died during a two-week period in Wausau, Wisconsin, are miraculously revived, police officer Dana Cypress (Melanie Scrofano) is on the case. But the reanimated townspeople aren’t your average zombies. After Revival Day, they go back to their normal lives — or so it seems, until a violent murder turns everyone, alive or undead, into a suspect. Based on writer Tim Seeley and artist Mike Norton’s Image Comics series of the same name, Revival, now streaming on Netflix, is co-created by Luke Boyce and Aaron B. Koontz. The 10-episode horror mystery series also stars Romy Weltman (Creeped Out), David James Elliott (Spinning Out), and Andy McQueen (Mrs. Davis).
Single mom and police officer Dana (Scrofano) is prepping to move to Chicago with her son, Cooper (Hudson Wurster), on the day the dead rise in Wausau. Her father, Sheriff Wayne Cypress (Elliott), urges her to drive into town to investigate. Upon arriving at the cemetery, she’s greeted by chaos: A man whose body was being incinerated at the morgue is now wandering about, townspeople covered in dirt and wearing their Sunday best are begging for help, and a little girl is crying for her mommy. Everybody’s asking the same question: What happened here?
Over a month later, Mayor Ken Dillisch (Conrad Coates) lifts the mandatory town-wide lockdown, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still keeping Wausau and the surrounding region under strict quarantine. Sheriff Cypress and his officers have been keeping a registry of the revived citizens. So far, they’ve identified 47 people, aka revivers, who died during the same two-week period — and came back to life. All of them appear to be perfectly normal human beings, even if many of their fellow townspeople are loath to welcome them back with open arms. Dana, still stuck in Wausau, is hooking up with a guy she picked up at the bar when she’s called to investigate a dead horse. At the scene, she finds the animal’s throat has been ripped out, and there are human teeth nearby.
Enter Dr. Ibrahim Ramin (McQueen), the man from the bar, who’s been assigned as the CDC’s new town liaison. He and his team confiscate the equine corpse after finding human teeth inside it, which match the teeth Dana found. After Ibrahim reveals to Dana that revivers have superhuman healing abilities, it doesn’t take long for her to put the pieces together: There’s an unknown reviver out there who’s strong enough to kill a horse with their bare hands (and teeth). What if they’re not the only one?
Meanwhile, Martha “Em” Cypress (Weltman), Dana’s sickly younger sister, has been having a hard time and hasn’t spoken to her family for weeks. Dana is worried when she finds her sister sleeping on a bench outside of town, but Em insists nothing is wrong. On their way home, Dana gets a call to check out some suspicious activity at a nearby farm, where she makes a few horrifying discoveries. As the town devolves into madness, Dana and her family realize that unraveling this mystery and surviving an undead infestation will mean putting their trust in others like never before.
