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Dead Set is a British Satire Zombie film Horror fiction television miniseries written and created by Charlie Brooker. The show takes place primarily on the set of a fictional series of the real television show Big Brother. The five episodes, aired over five consecutive nights, chronicle a zombie outbreak that strands the housemates and production staff inside the Big Brother House, which quickly becomes a shelter from the undead.
Dead Set is a production of Zeppotron, part of the Endemol group of production and distribution companies that produces the actual Big Brother. The series first aired on E4 starting on 27 October 2008, just six weeks after the end of Big Brother 2008 on the same channel.
| Helen Adams | Big Brother 2 |
| Paul "Bubble" Ferguson | Big Brother 2 |
| Eugene Sully | Big Brother 6 |
| Kinga Karolczak | Big Brother 6 |
| Makosi Musambasi | Big Brother 6 |
| Saskia Howard-Clarke | Big Brother 6 |
| Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace | Big Brother 7 |
| Imogen Thomas | Big Brother 7 |
| Brian Belo | Big Brother 8 |
| Ziggy Lichman | Big Brother 8 |
The first draft of the script was written in 2005, during the airing of Big Brother 6. He based some of his fictional housemates on actual former housemates. For example, he cited Maxwell Ward and Saskia Howard-Clarke as inspirations for Marky and Veronica, with Pippa and Space being loosely based on Helen Adams and Kieron "Science" Harvey respectively. For further inspiration, he attended the live eviction of George Galloway during Celebrity Big Brother 4, where he also visited the camera runs that surround the House.
Beyond Big Brother, Brooker noted several examples of zombie fiction that had inspired him, including the Dead series of films by George A. Romero, Zombie Flesh Eaters, 28 Days Later, The Walking Dead, The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue and Zombie Creeping Flesh.
Angela Jain, then head of E4, announced that she had commissioned the series in April 2008, although the true nature of the project was not publicly revealed until August of that year.
Filming for the series took place over the summer of 2008, mainly at Longcross Studios and the surrounding areas. The eviction of Pippa (Kathleen McDermott) was filmed at the actual Big Brother House in Elstree on 18 July 2008 – the same night that Belinda was evicted. Before she left the house, McDermott was placed in the stairwell of the House and "evicted" in front of the show's live audience. McDermott and Davina McCall had previously shot an improvised "eviction interview". In addition, several former Big Brother housemates appeared as themselves. They were filmed chatting to each other as part of a fictional "reunion" before Dead Set's crew members "surprised" them to film a shocked reaction.
Scenes featuring McCall as a zombie were filmed in one day, and the bodies lying around the corridor during the scene were created with SFX dummies (besides Eugene Sully's, which McCall is seen feasting on). McCall stated that she was covered in bruises the next day due to hammering on the door in several scenes. She based her zombie-running style on the T-1000 from the 1991 film . As she was restricted to only one day's filming, a dummy of McCall was used in some scenes for which she was unavailable.
Filming of the series was found to be difficult due to budgetary and time constraints. Some extras were redressed to play different zombies due to the cost of the contact lenses used as zombie eyes, and the scene in Episode 2 in which Alex and Riq's car breaks down was initially meant to be an explosive car crash. Brooker cited similar constraints for eliminating his original concept for the final episode, which would have been set six months after the outbreak. Many of the zombies featured in the crowd scenes – including the final assault on the house – were volunteers recruited through the internet.
In the second episode, Charlie Brooker also has a brief cameo as a zombie.
| Australia | SBS One | 9 November 2009 |
| Brazil | Multishow | 15 October 2009 |
| Spain | Canal + | 25 July 2009 |
| South Africa | Dstv BBC Entertainment | 3 September 2009 |
| France | Ciné+ Frisson | 17 and 18 October 2009 |
| Poland | BBC Entertainment; Cinemax, Cinemax 2 | 28 October 2009 |
| United States | IFC | 25 to 29 October 2010 |
| Italy | MTV Italia | 12 November 2010 |
| Sweden | TV11 | 20 February 2011 |
| Bulgaria | AXN | 7 August 2012 |
| Israel | HOT V.O.D | 4 July 2013 |
| The Netherlands | OutTV | 31 October 2013 |
| New Zealand | The Zone | 28 January 2015 |
The series was available to stream in the UK, Canada and the US on Netflix.
Simon Pegg, a co-writer and star of the zombie comedy film Shaun of the Dead, commented on Dead Set for The Guardian. While generally praising the series, he expressed dismay at the move away from the traditional slow zombies of the Romero films to the modern 'fast zombie' used in Dead Set which were akin to the infected from 28 Days Later or the zombies from the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake. Brooker responded that this was due to a variety of reasons, including budgetary constraints, the fact that Dead Set had to differentiate itself from Shaun of the Dead, as well as the plot requiring that the infection could put the entire country out of action before the producers had time to evacuate the studios. He also cited two George A. Romero films in which the zombies behaved non-traditionally, including a scene in the original Dawn of the Dead where two zombie children run.
Steve Greene of IndieWire, reviewing the series in 2017, noted similar themes in Dead Set and Brooker's later series, Black Mirror. He described the former as "an analog precursor to the digital-themed entertainment" featured in the latter.
On 24 April 2019, the production of the Brazilian series Reality Z, which was based on Dead Set, was announced. The show premiered on Netflix in 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which saw contestants of Big Brother around the world being isolated from news of the pandemic before being released back into a world under lockdown, drew comparisons with Dead Set (albeit, with the COVID-19 disease instead of a fictional zombie virus). However, this did not happen with the UK edition of Big Brother, which was the edition of the show that Dead Set is based on. Big Brother UK (which moved from Channel 4 to Channel 5 in 2011) was cancelled in 2018, slightly under two years before the global pandemic began in 2020.
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