2011 - 2012
Death Valley ran for a single twelve-episode season on MTV between August and October 2011. Created by Spider One (Michael Cummings, metal frontman of Powerman 5000 and the younger brother of Rob Zombie) with Eric Weinberg, it is a mockumentary comedy-horror about the Undead Task Force, an elite LAPD unit built from scratch to handle the werewolves, vampires, and zombies that have, six months before the show opens, mysteriously started roaming the San Fernando Valley.
The premise is deliberately deadpan. Nobody in the show has a theory for why the monsters are here. They just are, and the UTF has a shift to work through. A film crew rides along with the officers, handheld style, picking up whatever happens. Most episodes run tight ride-along plots with domestic-call silliness and the occasional brutal werewolf kill. Shot on location across southern California, it leans hard into its Valley geography. Strip malls. Flat suburban streets under flat Encino sunshine.
I came to it cold, expecting a cable misfire, and found a show that has more going on than its 2011 reputation suggests.
Current Standing: {{show:death-valley:rank_full}}
No lectures, no messaging, no agenda. This is an MTV cable comedy about cops shooting zombies in the head in between domestic disputes. The UTF is a mixed squad, but nothing about the show makes that the point. Carla Rinaldi is tough because she is a good cop. Billy Pierce is a disaster because Billy Pierce is a disaster. Stark is the muscle and the show lets him be the muscle, nothing more and nothing less.
MTV in 2011 was chasing edgy, and the show leans all the way in. Gore is practical and plentiful. Sexual content is frank. Werewolves show up naked after transformations because that is how werewolves work, and the show treats that as a workplace problem rather than a statement. You will not find a single line delivered to camera about systemic anything.
The UTF is an ensemble workplace comedy first and a monster-hunting procedural second. The squad is the show.
Caity Lotz
Rookie Kirsten Landry
Patricia Arquette
Guest star
Tania Raymonde
Carla Rinaldi
Rob Zombie
Himself (guest)
Texas Battle
John Stark
Bryce Johnson
John 'Stubeck' Stubeck
Charlie Sanders
Billy Pierce
Bryan Callen
Captain Frank Dashell
Guest appearances include Rob Zombie playing himself in a cameo that only exists because his brother created the show, and Patricia Arquette in a one-episode turn that is one of the season's weirdest and best hours.
Strip the monsters out and Death Valley is a workplace hangout comedy about six people in a job nobody trained them for. The mockumentary frame is doing a lot of the work. It is not subtle about where it got the idea. The Office is in its DNA, and you can feel the full decade of handheld cop-ride-along reality TV it is riffing on. There is also a dash of Parks and Rec in the way the squad bickers around a shared job they are all mildly overqualified for. Monsters are the gag. The humans are the show.
What is unusual about it is tonal commitment. The comedy is broad and improv-driven, but the horror is not softened for the joke. People get eaten on camera. A zombie child is a real beat. When the show wants to be scary for thirty seconds inside a comedy set piece, it goes fully scary. That whiplash between joke and dismemberment is the only real ambition the show has, and it mostly lands.
There is also a low-key ongoing question the show never answers about where the monsters came from. I liked that it never answers. The UTF has a job to do and nobody has time for origin stories. Six months ago the dead started walking, and the overtime got worse. That is the pitch, and the show sticks to it.
Handheld, natural light, in-camera sound. The camera crew is treated as a character the officers occasionally notice and mostly ignore. Editing is rough on purpose. Monster effects are a mix of practical gore and cheap prosthetics, leaning heavily on practical because the budget cannot fund better CGI. The gore is wet, the wounds look like wounds, and the werewolf transformations are cut around rather than shown, which is a smart call on a cable budget.
The Valley itself is the other half of the visual identity. Flat, sun-bleached stucco with Spanish tile roofs. Palm trees lining every street. A setting generally played for sitcom warmth, used here for genre tension. A vampire nest in a ranch house on a Tuesday afternoon is funnier and stranger than a vampire nest in a gothic castle, and the show knows it. The mundanity is the texture.
Ratings were middling. MTV did not renew, and the show ended after twelve episodes with plot threads left loose and no real closure. Critics at the time were kind but not enthusiastic. Filed under Interesting Experiment rather than Must Watch, and it disappeared from the conversation fast.
Its legacy is mostly tied up in Caity Lotz. She became a genuine star inside the Arrowverse, and a chunk of her audience has doubled back to Death Valley looking for her earliest lead work. Otherwise it lives as a cult footnote from a specific early-2010s moment when mockumentary was still a viable scripted format, MTV was still trying scripted drama, and Monster Procedural was a pitch a network would actually greenlight.
A cancelled-too-soon one-and-done that is much better than its commercial fate suggests, and worth a weekend for anyone who likes their horror with a workplace-sitcom chassis.
The show works because it commits. Nobody on screen is embarrassed by the premise. Callen and Johnson and Sanders play their scenes as though they really are cops with a zombie problem, not actors winking at the audience. The improv looseness keeps it breathing. The gore keeps it honest. Twelve episodes is the right length for a concept this thin, and the season finishes before the novelty wears off, even if that is mostly because nobody gave it a chance to outstay its welcome.
It is not a great show. It is a good one that was cancelled before it could become anything more. But for a weekend of undemanding, gory, funny genre television with a couple of actors who went on to bigger things, it earns its spot. I would watch a second season in a heartbeat.
Eric Weinberg
Co-creator
Spider One
Creator