Zombies. By now they’re the ‘Harlem Shake’ of 21st century pop culture, ubiquitous to the point of tedium.

But their unending media resurrection is understandable. The zombie is the perfect analogous villain; a terrifying blank slate which writers can use to represent and explore any number of our modern fears. Mindless consumerism, pandemics, addiction, a fear of your body becoming an all-you-can-eat buffet…

And just as you wonder if there’s any fresh message to be picked from the stale carcass of the zombie genre, Dominic Mitchell’s new BBC Three drama In the Flesh comes along.

Months after the end of a zombie outbreak, and many of the undead have been successfully rehabilitated, now categorised under the politically-correct term ‘Partially Deceased Syndrome Sufferer’. Being a zombie – sorry, PDS sufferer – is treated with all the NHS joy of having a terminal disease, and with it now (apparently) under control, many are being re-assimilated into the society they once breakfasted on.

One of these necrotised misfits is Kieren (Luke Newberry), an attractive young corpse haunted by flashbacks to his time as a ‘Rotter’. The world he returns to looks drained of life, and not simply because of the muted colour palette it’s shot through. It’s a country in unsteady recovery, with both the living and the undead trying to overcome the physical and psychological wounds inflicted. In the best indication of just how damaged the world is post-zombies, a pint costs £3. The humanity…

No wonder then that some aren’t keen to see the dead walking back onto their cul-de-sacs and high streets. In the Flesh‘s rehabilitated zombies returning to their homes to pretend to be human again might be likened to a sex offender being reintroduced into the neighbourhood: the result is twitching curtains, hushed voices, and an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, and imminent violence.

In Kieren’s home town of Roarton, the Human Volunteer Force, a rag-tag militia led by Bill Macy (Steve Evets), demonstrate a lynch-mob brutality that not only makes for the most powerful and down-right upsetting scene in the hour but also shows the true cost of the zombie uprising: a basic loss of humanity among the living. In this new world the true monsters aren’t those hiding behind flesh-tinted make-up and contact lenses.

This is a zombie drama that feeds on brains for psychological purposes rather than shocks. There’s very little gore (what gore there is is of an impressive quality) but there’s a constant atmosphere of knife-edge uncertainty and palpable fear. It’s stoked by our own doubts over whether zombie rehabilitation, but truly fuelled by the actions of those living whose hearts still beat with rage.

And it’s here where In the Flesh turns the rot of zombie ubiquity into something you’d tune in for – by measuring our humanity against our capacity for acceptance and forgiveness. Because whether you’re zombie or human, once the blood and viscera has been wiped away, and the graves have been filled in, a question remains: Could you ever come to terms with the things that you’d done in the name of survival?

Airs at 10pm on Sunday 17 March 2013 on BBC Three.

Are you looking forward to In the Flesh? Let us know below…