“This isn’t The Walking Dead. It’s reality.”

As if living through COVID wasn't bad enough, the trailer for the upcoming satirical zombie series The Bite imagines “a new virulent strain of COVID” that turns people into zombies, even though, as one doctor from the CDC insists in the clip, “Zombies are fictional.” 

Check out the new trailer below:

Courtesy of Michelle and Robert King, the team behind The Good Fight and Evil, The Bite follows two neighbors Rachel (Audra McDonald) and Lily (Taylor Schilling) as they try to deal with the new normal in NYC by working from home during a global pandemic. While Rachel juggles her telemedicine clients and a shaky marriage to a CDC doctor (Steven Pasquale) who works in Washington D.C., her upstairs neighbor Lily tries to convince her Wall Street clientele that her services (which you can guess from the trailer) can be provided through a video screen just as well as in person.

But when Rachel witnesses a telemedicine client pull a Romero on a Zoom meeting (damn you, malfunctioning mute button!) and a client of Lily’s is thought to be high on bath salts (those bite marks around his ankle suggests it’s probably something else), the two realize they may be dealing with a new NEW normal (damn you, new virus strains!). 

However, as dangerous as this new situation is, it’s not like they can pack their bags and head for the hills. As one sour-faced woman says: “I don’t care if we’re in the End Times, everybody has to pay their rent.” 

Although billed as a drama, the tone of the trailer (set to Peggy Marsh’s perky and chipper “The Impossible Happened”) leads us to believe that the series will lean just as much into comedy as horror. 

The six-episode series also stars Will Swenson, Phillipa Soo, and Leslie Uggams.

The Bite premieres May 21 on Spectrum.