Daybreak, as a rambunctious comedy-horror series, doesn't always hit the mark, but at its best, you'll find a generous swirl of Buffy, Scott Pilgrim, Zombieland, and other bouncily clever genre super-colliders.

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Netflix's Daybreak: Season 1 Photos 13 IMAGES

Daybreak is also the latest in a line of notable Netflix offerings involving "teens doing whatever the f*** they want." Whether it's outcasts on the run in The End of the F***ing World or youths trying to govern themselves in The Society, the streaming service seems to love asking, "But what if there were no adults?" This show, loosely based on the comic series by Brian Ralph, takes the concept a few steps further by turning high school into Mad Max... with zombies. All while (mostly successfully) mashing things up with iconic movie touchstones like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Goodfellas, kung-fu films, three-camera sitcoms, and more.Naturally, this also means the teen heroes we follow don't exactly act or feel like real high schoolers. They all seem to have the pop-culture interests of a writers' room filled with 40-somethings, which might make your eye twitch now and again, pulling you out of the story somewhat. But for the most part, Daybreak is such an all-or-nothing endeavor, presenting our annihilated future as a bats*** bouncy house that mirrors the strains of school itself (much like how Buffy's monster hunts lined up with her own emotional journeys through adolescence), that it's easy for some of the unrealistic overspeak to get muted in the shuffle.Under the Dome's Colin Ford plays "Just" Josh, a former outlier at Glendale High (yes, the story is fairly So. Cal-specific) who's now enjoying a newfound freedom in a post-nuclear holocaust wasteland thanks to his survival skills (which, as a Canadian, are finely honed). His goal? To track down and save his love Sam Dean, played by Sophie Simnett. (No mention of her being an official Winchester, by the way, despite Ford also having appeared in Supernatural.) But were they actual boyfriend/girlfriend or was it all an "it's complicated" situation? We find out as the saga unfolds, but his mission to locate her never wavers. It's through Josh, who belonged to no clique, that we get introduced to the badlands status quo of teenage warlord zones - from the Jocks to the STEM Punks to the Cheermazons to the 4H Club and more.Josh's ragtag crew of collected stragglers, as he begins to form a crew of people with no communities, includes Alyvia Alyn Lind's psychotic genius Angelica (yes, there's small cameo by Alyvia's sister, Natalie, too), Austin Crute's "samurai looking to repent" Wesley Fists, Gregory Kasyan's scheming preener Eli Cardashyan, and their former teacher, Ms. Crumble (Krysta Rodriguez), seemingly one of the last remaining adults on the planet. Which brings me to the next big element of Daybreak: No grown ups.The missiles that obliterated the world (which is never fully explained except save for "adults ruined everything") contained a biological agent that spared the kids and turned the older folks into "ghoulies" - which are basically zombies that will rip your face off while repeating the last words they spoke before the bombs hit - generally inane suburban parent speak (not unlike Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die). Naturally, Crumble being around means that there's a little more going on than meets the eye, and that all gets addressed in the back half of the season.Then there are bad guys looming around the San Gabriel Valley - like the maniacal (and mono-syllabic) Turbo Bro Jock (Riverdale's Cody Kearsley), his sniveling minions on the the former golf team, and the cannibalistic bogeyman Baron Triumph. All in all, Daybreak presents us with a very fun game board, filled with a colorful and crazed array of characters, most of whom, surprisingly, carry with them a decently dramatic backstory. In fact, even with all of Daybreak's insanity, the show is often most effective when it sits with actual emotion. And it even uses some of its heavier themes to carry us through the scruff of the season - with episodes seven, "Canta Tu Vida," and eight, "Post Mates," nicely diverging from the ongoing carnage to give us probing peaks back into the lives of Crumble, Josh, and Sam. Both episodes are extremely different, but both also work extremely well.Naturally, we have to address the Bueller in the room here. Not only is Josh, as a character (at least at the outset) meant to evoke John Hughes' Ferris Bueller, but O.G. Ferris himself, Matthew Broderick, is on the show as the warm, ever-positive Principal Burr.It's an enormously enjoyable role filled with a couple of twists and turns that I don't want to spoil for you, but as the most present adult character on the series, aside from Crumble, Broderick really lends a lot to the proceedings. Burr represents authority, but also a type of soft, ineffective, temporary care. The type of person who's expected to care about other human beings during a point in their life when they're selfish and cruel. And Broderick hilariously chisels out a balance between nature and nurture, discipline and dopiness.