Worried About A Global Pandemic? You Should Watch Kingdom On Netflix – Forbes

South Korean zombie show 'Kingdom' is a thrilling, terrifying look at an undead pandemic.

I only started watching Netflixs South Korean zombie drama Kingdom recently. I wanted to finish the short six-episode season before Season 2 came out on March 13th. Thats tomorrowFriday the 13th.

It was actually kind of strange watching this show as fears surrounding COVID-19 (aka the coronavirus) began to mount. Hearing news stories of the new virus spreading from China to Korea to Italy and then to . . . everywhere, while watching a show about the start of a zombie pandemic was almost surreal.

Sure, COVID-19 is not an apocalypse. There are no undead hordes storming the gates. But fear continues to grow. The WHO has dubbed it a global pandemic. Stores are out of toilet paper and disinfectant. Disney Land is shutting down and the NBA has cancelled its season. Virtually every video game conference, plus SXSW and numerous other public gatherings have been shut down.

Ive literally never seen anything like it. A part of me thinks that everyone is overreacting. Another part of me wonders how bad this is going to get. Even though symptoms in normal, healthy people tend to be mostly flu-like and mild, the estimated mortality rate at this point is much higher than the influenza virus, in part because nobody is immune and there is no herd immunity in communities to keep the virus from spreading.

COVID-19 is much less deadly than something like SARS. Deadlier viruses are easier to contain and quarantine. So COVID-19 will spread much further but still have a higher mortality rate than influenza. This is a bad combination. Until herd immunity starts to occur and a vaccine is created, it will continue to spread, posing a challenge none of us have faced in our lifetimes.

Pandemic And Intrigue

Kingdom

With all this in mind, watching the very excellent Kingdom on Netflix is really an experience right now. Without spoiling the details, you see the start of the zombie pandemic and the desperate fight to prevent its spread, sort of like the beginning of Fear The Walking Dead but much, much better. In a weird way, it will make you glad that COVID-19 is just a bad virus and not the start of a zombie apocalypse. Not yet at least. Silver linings and all that.

The show is written by Kim Eun-hee and directed by Kim Seong-hun and stars Ji-Hoon Ju as Crown Prince Chang. Its one of the best zombie shows Ive ever seen, and a refreshing change after writing about The Walking Dead for so many years. The zombies in Kingdom are nothing like the shambling herds in AMCs zombie drama. Theyre much faster, for one thing.

Better still, theres all kinds of political intrigue and drama, almost in the vein of Game Of Thrones (a show which had its own zombies, though ultimately they were such a massive letdown). So zombie pandemic, Game of Thrones style political intrigue, a fantastic cast of characters and lots of violencejust the kind of thing to take your mind off the fact that you cant find toilet paper anywhere.

Either that or I have this all backwards and you should definitely not watch Kingdom because it hits way too close to home and will scare you even more. Im not really sure!

P.S. Please watch the subtitle version and not the dub. Its so much better. Its very easy to switch to subtitles in Netflix and I will hear no excuses or arguments that somehow the dub is better.

Kingdom

Worried About A Global Pandemic? You Should Watch Kingdom On Netflix – Forbes

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