I Would Rather Die

I Would Rather Die (Prefiero la muerte) is a Mexican teen zombie comedy on Prime Video, created and co-directed by Sebastián Sariñana with Humberto Hinojosa. Eight half-hour episodes, all dropped October 2. Diego Bernal plays Archie Pérez, a shy kid in the provincial town of Mendoza carrying a years-long crush on Brenda (Farah Justiniani). Early on, Archie gets bitten in a corner store. He doesn't die, exactly. He turns, but he keeps his head, his memories, and the crush. His goth best friend Cris (Lilith Curiel) and Brenda get pulled in. Fernanda Castillo plays Detective Sara Díaz, who ends up tangled with the kids. The town has bigger problems than one bitten teenager: a vitamin pyramid scheme, a cadre of hyper-religious ladies, the usual school bully.

Castillo is the pro in the room and she treats the show like it deserves her. Her detective keeps the tone from floating off into pure cartoon. Bernal is a real find in the lead — he plays Archie's rotting-but-alive problem as mostly embarrassment, which is funnier than playing it as horror. Curiel, fresh off Cometierra, pockets most of her scenes as Cris. Sariñana writes small-town Mexican specificity into the margins instead of generic apocalypse set dressing, and the pyramid-scheme-plus-church-ladies setup gives the show a target that isn't just "the horde."

Half-hour episodes make the whole season about four hours, and it still feels stretched. The high-school-crush engine idles whenever the show remembers it has a bigger plot to service, and the bigger plot idles whenever the crush takes the wheel. Comedy beats land maybe 60% of the time. The gore is PG-polite, so horror fans expecting Santa Clarita Diet with teeth get something closer to a telenovela with prosthetics. Sariñana's direction is competent, not inventive. You can see the needle-drops coming.

If you liked Santa Clarita Diet, iZombie, or Diablero, you're in the right lane. Fans of Club de Cuervos-era Mexican streaming comedy will recognize the DNA. If you need your zombie media mean — The Walking Dead, 28 Days Later — bounce in episode two. Same if you're allergic to teen romance as a load-bearing wall. This is a Sunday-afternoon-with-your-phone-also-open show, not a lean-in show.

BACKGROUND TV is the honest line. The ambition is modest, the execution hits the mark often enough to not insult you, and the premise — zombie who keeps his personality — is a solid hook that the writers don't push as hard as they could. Castillo and Bernal are doing more work than the scripts deserve. There's no sermon problem here; the show's themes about dying young and loving anyway stay inside the story, carried by character instead of monologue. It's just a pleasant, uneven comedy that plays better with laundry in your lap than with the lights off. Worth a flyer, not a cleared evening.