Produced by Zeppotron (then part of Endemol), Dead Set was filmed primarily in summer 2008 at Longcross Studios and at the real Big Brother house in Elstree. It originally aired on E4 from 27 to 31 October 2008 as a five-episode run, and was later repeated on Channel 4 in January 2009. The miniseries was released on DVD by Channel 4 DVD.
Dead Set received generally positive reviews from critics for combining gore with social commentary, and was nominated for the Drama Serial award at the British Academy Television Awards in 2009. At the British Academy Television Craft Awards the same year, it won the Interactive Creative Contribution award and received a further nomination for Brooker. The series has since been cited as an early companion piece to Brooker's later work Black Mirror and inspired the Brazilian Netflix adaptation, Reality Z.
Plot
On eviction night of Big Brother, reports of violent disorder across the UK raise the possibility that the live show will be cancelled. Inside the house, contestants Marky, Veronica, Grayson, Joplin, Angel, Space and Pippa remain oblivious. Producer Patrick bullies and berates his staff as presenter Davina McCall prepares for the broadcast. Production runner Kelly is having an affair with a co-worker, while her boyfriend Riq is stranded at a railway station after his van is stolen.
Elsewhere, a driver is bitten by a zombie and reaches the production compound just as he dies and reanimates, attacking a security guard. As Pippa is evicted, the infected guard stumbles into the crowd, dies and turns; the infection rapidly spreads through the compound. Zombies overrun the studio, killing the audience, crew and Davina. Kelly survives by barricading herself in an office, while Patrick saves himself by sacrificing others and takes refuge in a green room with the newly evicted Pippa, as zombie Davina prowls nearby.
By morning, the housemates remain cut off and confused by Big Brother’s silence, with only Space sensing something is wrong. Kelly tries to escape in a van but is forced back inside; chased through the camera runs by a zombie cameraman, she enters the house via a Diary Room side door. The housemates assume she is a new contestant until she warns them about the outbreak and the danger behind the one-way mirrors. When Marky opens a fire exit to taunt her, the cameraman bursts in, bites Angel, and is killed by Kelly with a fire extinguisher.
Riq survives by hiding in a petrol station until he is rescued by a hardened survivor, Alex. After their vehicle breaks down and zombies give chase, they take shelter in a country house. In the Big Brother house, nurse Grayson lacks supplies to treat Angel’s bite, so the group confines her to the greenhouse. Kelly, Marky and Space raid a nearby supermarket in the van. Police responding to looting shoot a bitten officer, then mistake Marky’s arm injury for a bite; Kelly takes the dead officer’s gun, shoots the surviving policeman in the leg, and leaves him as zombies descend. Back at the house, Angel turns; Grayson is mortally wounded and reanimates, and Joplin and Veronica kill him. Kelly returns and puts Angel down.
Riq later discovers the Big Brother live feed is still broadcasting on E4 and sees Kelly on screen. Believing the Big Brother house offers his best chance of safety, he and Alex travel by river; at a lock, Alex is bitten and forces Riq to kill her before she turns, and he continues alone.
Patrick and Pippa kill zombie Davina and reach the control room, where Patrick uses the PA system to contact the housemates and guide them into the house. He insists on attempting to reach the coast, but Kelly shows him the horde massed at the compound gates. Patrick proposes using Grayson’s remains as bait to reach the van, dividing the group. When Riq arrives, Marky—armed with an assault rifle—nearly shoots him until Kelly recognises him. Riq warns that Patrick’s plan is futile; the housemates restrain Patrick, but he exploits Diary Room secrets and public perception to manipulate Joplin, takes Kelly hostage, and forces the group outside with the bait. The bait is dropped during a struggle, Patrick fatally shoots Riq, and Joplin opens the gates in desperation, allowing the undead to flood the compound. Joplin is devoured and Patrick is torn apart as the survivors scramble back toward the house.
Space retreats to the control room and coordinates defence over the PA, but is bitten while unlocking the Diary Room as the house is overrun. Kelly reaches the Diary Room as Marky and Veronica are killed, and Space sees Pippa among the undead. Kelly urges Space to open the exterior door so she can fight her way to the van; he reluctantly complies. The next morning, the surviving characters have reanimated, and the Big Brother live feed broadcasts zombie Kelly’s vacant stare across televisions in the UK.
Charlie Brooker said that the basic idea for the series came about in 2004, when he was watching the American series 24. He commented: "I'm enjoying this, but these terrorists are just ridiculous. They're like waves of Space Invaders. They might as well be zombies."[14] He then imagined an apocalypse occurring during the filming of Big Brother, and cited the Big Brother house as a good place to hide during a zombie outbreak.[14][15]
Brooker wrote the first draft of the script in 2005, during the airing of Big Brother 6.[14] He said he based some of the fictional housemates on former Big Brother contestants; he cited Maxwell Ward and Saskia Howard-Clarke as inspirations for Marky and Veronica, and described Pippa and Space as being loosely based on Helen Adams and Kieron "Science" Harvey, respectively.[15] For further inspiration, he attended the live eviction of George Galloway during Celebrity Big Brother 4 and visited the camera runs surrounding the house.[16]
Angela Jain, then head of E4, announced that she had commissioned the series in April 2008,[17] although the setting and premise were not publicly revealed until August of that year.[18]
Filming
Brooker described the Big Brother eye logo featured in Dead Set as a combination of several of the logos used across the franchise.[19] The production designed the fictional Big Brother set to resemble the television programme, including similar cameras, two-way mirrors that could be angled to conceal the camera crew, astroturf and a modified Diary Room chair from Big Brother 8.[19] Scenes set inside the house for the first episode were shot using Digital Betacam to match the look of Big Brother, while other scenes were filmed using an Arriflex D-20.[20]
Filming took place during the summer of 2008, primarily at Longcross Studios and in surrounding areas. The eviction of Pippa (Kathleen McDermott) was filmed at the Big Brother house in Elstree on 18 July 2008, the same night that Belinda was evicted from Big Brother 9.[16] McDermott was positioned in the stairwell and "evicted" in front of the live audience, and she and Davina McCall filmed an improvised "eviction interview" in advance.[16][21] Several former Big Brother housemates also appeared as themselves; they were filmed speaking together as part of a fictional reunion before the production recorded their reactions to the outbreak.[16]
Scenes featuring McCall as a zombie were filmed in one day, and the bodies in the corridor sequence were created using special-effects dummies (except Eugene Sully's, which McCall is shown eating). McCall said she was bruised the next day from repeatedly hammering on a door during filming, and she based her running style on the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).[22] Because she was available for only one day, a dummy of McCall was used in some shots.[23]
Brooker said filming was affected by budgetary and time constraints. Extras were sometimes redressed to play multiple zombies because of the cost of contact lenses used for the zombies' eyes, and a scene in episode 2 in which Alex and Riq's car breaks down was originally planned as an explosive crash.[23] He also said constraints led him to drop an original concept for the final episode, which would have been set six months after the outbreak.[24] Many of the zombies in crowd scenes, including the final assault on the house, were volunteers recruited online.[25]
Brooker has a brief cameo as a zombie in the second episode.[16]
Release
Promotion
A map for the Borehamwood region, the site of the real Big Brother House, was added to the browser-based game Urban Dead as part of the series' promotion, with a competition to win a copy of the DVD.[26]
In an interview about the campaign's interactive work, created by Will Clark, Chris Hassell and Stuart Holton, they said the promotion targeted online fan communities by combining Big Brother imagery with zombie-horror, including an interactive Diary Room clip in which a blood-covered contestant appears to write the viewer's entered name on the wall, and described the concept as "almost a magic cocktail".[27] The interactive campaign later won a British Academy Television Craft Award for Interactive Creative Contribution.[28]
Broadcast
Dead Set aired on E4 from 27 to 31 October 2008 (a 70-minute premiere followed by four 35-minute episodes, including adverts).[1] The series was later repeated on Channel 4 from 6 January 2009.[1]
The DVD extras include interviews with the director, writer and cast, behind-the-scenes and special effects featurettes, and a selection of deleted and extended scenes, including:
Pippa's eviction in full (featuring scenes shot from inside the actual Big Brother 9 house staircase)
A scene featuring Patrick discussing "recycling" Grayson's body
An extended version of Patrick mocking Veronica over her relationship with Marky
Pippa's death in the final episode at the hands of her undead mother.
Reception
Critical response
Dead Set received generally positive reviews from critics. As of 24 January 2026, Rotten Tomatoes reports an approval rating of 92% based on 12 reviews, with the site's critical consensus reading: "A bloody take on Big Brother, Dead Set blends sharp satire and gleeful gore with unexpectedly poignant -- and genuinely scary -- results."[7] Metacritic assigned the series a weighted average score of 77 out of 100, based on six critics, indicating "generally favourable reviews".[32]
In The Guardian, Chris Moran praised Dead Set for bringing Big Brother into "a new realm of horror" through "sharp and bloody satire". He wrote that the series’ "absurdly high concept" was "translated to the screen with real confidence and skill", and that Brooker’s humour had "made the journey intact". Moran argued that the reality-TV setting enabled pointed social commentary, calling it "the first zombie film since Romero's Dawn of the Dead to successfully pull off satire" and describing the undead as "a powerful metaphor" in the right context. He singled out Jaime Winstone’s performance, writing that she brought "just the right blend of vulnerability and strength", and concluded that Dead Set had a "zip, conviction and style" that compared favourably with slick American television.[2]
In a positive review for The New York Times, television critic Mike Hale wrote that Dead Set "deftly" connects "reality television and zombification". He argued that, despite its satirical premise, the series largely plays as a "well-made" and "increasingly grim" horror story, praising its "crispness of execution".[30]
In a review for Dread Central, Phil Newton wrote that Dead Set merges zombie-horror tropes with the mechanics of Big Brother, calling Brooker’s script "a delight" that "gets that delicate balance of humour and horror just right". Newton praised the production’s authenticity (shot in the real Big Brother house, with Davina McCall appearing as herself) and highlighted Andy Nyman’s performance as the producer Patrick as the standout, writing that the series was "worth watching for his performance alone". Although he felt the timeline was "a little erratic in places", Newton ultimately described Dead Set as "unmissable television" and "highly recommended".[33]
In a more negative review for The Hollywood Reporter, Barry Garron described Dead Set as "neither as suspenseful nor as clever as it pretends to be". He criticised the series’ technical execution, saying it "falls short of even matching the production values of The Blair Witch Project", and argued that it had a "frightening lack of suspense" despite its gore. Garron concluded that many characters were so unpleasant that "the most challenging part" was "not cheering for the zombies".[34]
Simon Pegg, 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 George A. 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.[35] 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 Romero films in which the zombies behaved non-traditionally, including a scene in the original Dawn of the Dead where two zombie children run.[24]
Critics and commentators have described Dead Set as a forerunner to Brooker's later anthology series Black Mirror.[38][39] In a retrospective interview, Brooker said that Dead Set "contains all of Black Mirror's DNA".[40]
In 2013, the fourteenth series of Big Brother featured a quarantine-themed task involving a fictional viral outbreak, which was reported to have been inspired by Dead Set.[41] Brooker later wrote that the programme's production team had checked that he did not mind the reference.[42]
In 2019, Netflix announced the Brazilian series Reality Z, a local adaptation of Dead Set, which premiered on 10 June 2020.[43][44]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, media coverage of Big Brother contestants emerging from isolation to a changed outside world drew comparisons with the premise of Dead Set.[45]
↑"Dead Set sold abroad". BFI Collections Search. British Film Institute. 20 March 2009. Retrieved 24 January 2026. The BIG BROTHER-themed zombie series DEAD SET has been sold to broadcasters in Spain, Australia and Sweden, and to BBC Entertainment in Africa.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
↑Newton, Phil (14 November 2008). Barton, Steve (ed.). "Dead Set (2008)". Dread Central. Archived from the original on 27 October 2020. Retrieved 25 January 2026.
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