‘Dead Of Summer’ Could Not Be Glummer
Photo: Freeform
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. This snail-paced series, slicked with wet sincerity about young people discovering their inner strength, is set in 1989. It apparently wants to evoke memories of everything from the ’80s slasher film Sleepaway Camp to 2001’s Wet Hot American Summer, but it lacks the energy, sex quotient, and scares-per-hour to achieve anything except a certain awkward creepiness.
Elizabeth Mitchell plays Deb, the camp director, and she chooses to play her looking perennially worried and shifty-eyed — though to be fair she may just be scanning past the cameras for the Uber she called to pick her up after shooting. Mitchell’s presence can be ascribed to having worked on Lost and Once Upon a Time, along with Dead of Summer’s creators, producers Adam Horowitz, Edward Kitsis, and Ian Goldberg. Her loyalty has not been rewarded.
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The real stars of the show are the teen-ish-aged camp counselors, who include an Innocent Blond Newbie Through Whom We Learn Everyone’s Past (played by Elizabeth Lail) and a Cocky Sleazy Guy Who’s Really a Damaged Soul (Ronen Rubenstein). The counselors make unfunny jokes and eye each other lustfully, in between screaming “Eeeek!” while looking straight into the camera. This last strategy hides the source of fear from us at precisely the moment when Dead of Summer cuts to a commercial.
This is one of those productions in which Everyone Has a Secret, and to demonstrate that, the show periodically stops its minimal action to flash back to even slower scenes that reveal some youthful trauma that summer camp will resolve one way or another, either by the glorious triumph of maturation or the ignominious punishment of being scared silly. And the scares are silly, chief among them a tall man who pops up occasionally dressed like a 19th century dandy and frowns disapprovingly at the kids — or perhaps at the entire production. A dead deer makes a cameo appearance. One camper goes swimming and sees a floating corpse, but like a number of other odd phenomena, the show does not make it clear whether people are hallucinating or actually seeing something that merits fright.
The spell-it-all-out dialogue has the curious effect of making things even more confusing. “You can find out who you are here. You can be who you want to be,” Deb tells her young charges in that wonderfully warm voice Mitchell can use so well. Then, a few minutes later, Dave, the glowering old camp gardener (is that a position camps hire for?), says in a voice filled with gravel he may have picked up from the garden, “The longer you stay, the worse it’ll be. You have no idea what this place is.”
Dave is correct. After watching two hours of Dead of Summer, I had no idea what this place was supposed to be. I took Dave’s advice and scrammed.
Dead of Summer airs Tuesday night at 9 p.m. on Freeform.
