Because it’s especially fun to introduce you to shows you won’t be able to watch, here’s Dead Set.

Dead Set is a six-episode British series that deals with the big “what if” scenario of zombies taking over the set of Big Brother. The idea — presumably — stems from the fact that Big Brother contestants are sequestered from the outside world with no access to TVs or other media. Thus, they have no concept of world events (like, famously, the 9/11 attacks in the show’s third American season). To make an obvious comparison, Dead Set seems to be part 28 Days Later (complete with digital double-speed film techniques) meets the Blair Witch Project with an amped-up sense of pop culture.

See the trailer below (warning: it’s bloody):

I really like the idea of making a genre series (or movie, or mini-series, or whatever) out of something that is so firmly rooted in pop culture. The best part of any zombie movie or space-invasion movie is seeing how the world we know is transformed by the big event (think of the opening scenes of 28 Days Later when Cillian Murphy’s character is walking around a deserted London). But rooting the zombie movie story around a tangible bit of pop culture — an officially-branded, proper name entertainment staple — adds an extra dimension to work with and makes the idea more realistic.

The down-side to this is that it can all be done really shoddily. You don’t want to see such a big idea fail catastrophically, so it’s always best to have the backing of a major studio.

And even that doesn’t work sometimes. I point you to MTV’s The Real World: The Lost Season — a TV movie based on the premise that a deranged staffer kidnapped the cast members of The Real World: Vancouver. The movie, which feature cameos by Real World alumni, featured a lot of name-dropping and meta reality TV references. It wasn’t necessarily painful to watch (and it was admirable for its ambition), but there was an inescapable sense of gimmickry to the venture.

Perhaps, though, with the amount of blood in Dead Set, you’ll forget about the cheese and high-concept.

I realize that, week to week, the number of segments on SNL do not change dramatically. In fact, this season’s first four episodes have all operated in the twelve-to-fourteen segment range (counting music and Update; not counting opening or closing credits). But this week’s installment felt unusually packed with short and funny, if sometimes insubstantial, sketches. The Lawrence Welk sketch, in which an old-timey singing family contended with a misfit sister (Kristen Wiig playing a derivative but funny cross between Rachel Dratch’s Angelina Jolie lovechild and those non-SNL “baby hands” sketches online), set the pace: quick set-up, hammer a central joke, garnish with optional side jokes, and get out.

Not surprisingly, this strategy tends to work best when the central joke is somewhat inexplicable, as with Welk or the dancing courtship between Bobby Moynihan and host Anne Hathaway. A later sketch, withHathaway as Mary Poppins explaining the meaning of “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to Moynihan and Casey Wilson, was a less successful of echo of Moynihan’s Of Mice and Men sketch from the James Franco episode a few weeks back. You can picture how these sketches probably came about, with writers riffing on pop-culture obsessions and eventually writing it out. But the Of Mice and Men bit somehow avoided sounding like a “what’s up with that?” observation, while the Mary Poppins sketch went on autopilot almost immediately (or maybe it just paled in comparison to the episode-long Simpsons version of the source material).

But the pop-culture-debris approach worked more often than not: I loved Casey Wilson’s caricature of Katy Perry (hawking a CD of her “less provocative” songs). Thin political impressions can grow tiresome, but sometimes the simplest celebrity skewerings work best. Every blog covering politics and/or SNL will probably link to the VP debate sketch, so let me shine a spotlight on something far less zeitgeisty yet still hilarious:

Andy Samberg has never fancied himself an impressionist — he’s appeared in several sketches flaunting his supposed total lack of facility in this department — but damned if he doesn’t do an absolutely spot-on Mark Wahlberg. Between the above sketch and another excellent digital short, Samberg owned several of the night’s best moments. He started his tenure on the show as an overhyped next-gen Jimmy Fallon; somehow, though, he’s since wound up one of SNL’s most underrated talents.

While the non-political sketches were pitched as goofy and efficient throwaways, the two political bits were by far the longest of the night; the writers seem to be emboldened by the suggestion that they’re contributing to the political conversation, even when the material isn’t really there. The VP debate sketch was fine, of course, a better synthesis of obvious and semi-obvious jokes than its presidential counterpart (helped immeasurably by Tina Fey’s version of Palin). But the bailout press-conference sketch felt muddled; once again, the writers seemed to be satirizing “all sides” more out of obligation than inspiration.

If I haven’t said much about Anne Hathaway’s work as host, it’s because she often wasn’t in the spotlight, as screentime was doled out with unusual equality this week. Just about everyone (save Darrell Hammond, who routinely sits out most of any episode that doesn’t require him to impersonate an older political figure no one else in the cast can handle) found strong moments: Will Forte singing on Weekend Update; Bill Hader’s mincing fake gay walk followed by a manly stride; Fred Armisen’s muppety Barney Frank. This evenness extended to Hathaway, who seemed happy to blend in (the monologue, her one solo showcase, was about a minute long). Scarlett Johansson still (somewhat inexplicably) sets the gold standard for recent starlet hosts, but Hathaway was clearly game, sending up her relationship problems (in that brief monologue) and her Disney heritage.

The Killers were okay; they seem to have dialed things back from their inadvertent empty-grandeur phase, back when they made the mistake of trying to release a Springsteen-esque album within a few weeks of the Hold Steady. But their acceptable, well-oiled song machines fit right in with this solid, well-crafted episode.

Episode Grade: B

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