If AMC’s The Walking Dead is the miserabilist emo-goth teen of the televisual zombie apocalypse, then Syfy’s Z Nation is its swaggering, devil-may-care little cousin, who’s having too much fun smoking weed, gorging on pop-culture tropes and generally dicking around to waste its time indulging in any gravely serious, existential, pseudo-political clap-trap. Therein lies the secret to Z Nation‘s appeal: it’s fun. It laughs at itself, and wants you to laugh along, too.

Comparisons with The Walking Dead are inevitable, and not just because the two shows share the zombie apocalypse as a backdrop. Z Nation is made by The Asylum, a production company that’s become synonymous with jumping on a bandwagon, copying the schematics for that bandwagon, and then producing their own bandwagon that is kind of the same but different (certainly different enough to avoid litigation), and available at a fraction of the price of the original.

That’s the company’s time-honored business model: to churn out low-budget, straight-to-video versions of the year’s most lucrative movies and franchises, and make money bottom-feeding from the fanbases of the originals. Some in the industry routinely accuse The Asylum of not merely standing on the shoulders of giants, but standing on those shoulders with the express intention of pissing directly into the eyes of the giants. I, for one, find it hard to peruse The Asylum’s back-catalogue of “mock-busters” – Transmorphers, Paranormal Event, Hunter vs Alien, to name but a few – without wearing an especially large grin. You’ve got to admire the size of those moxie-scented balls.

It’s a win/win model: If The Asylum produces a good movie, people will be more effusive in their praise precisely because their expectations were lower than the Earth’s core going in; if it produces a truly terrible movie, then they’ll still garner a huge cult following from the legions of bad-movie connoisseurs out there: “Oh my God, Crack-odile: The Jaws Of Meth is shit, it’s so shit, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen, I love it! Pass me the avocado dip and celery sticks once you’re done with that joint, Geoffrey, and we’ll shove on the sequel.”