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Prime Video’s Fallout, an adaptation of the popular video game series of the same name, is set more than two centuries from now on an Earth still devastated by a long-ago nuclear war between the United States and China. The protagonist, Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), emerges from the underground fallout shelter where she’s lived her entire life in search of her father, and a fuller understanding of the world above, a wasteland is dominated by warring factions and freakish mutants.
It’s a gutsy, hilarious adaptation of out-there source material, and it’s wild to consider that, in the space of a couple of years, we’ve gone from approximately zero worthwhile video game adaptations to having two series (the other being HBO’s The Last of Us) contending for Outstanding series Emmys. Strange days. Yet these two are definitely not the only post-apocalyptic narratives you’ll find streaming right now. Here are 15 more to shows, from dramatic, to funny, to everything between, to fuel your end times fantasies. (It’s fine, everything’s fine, I’m fine lol.)
Twisted Metal (2023 – )
This ’90s were a great time for post-apocalyptic video games, and the 2020s seem to be a great time to adapt them for TV. The most brutal show on Peacock is based on the vehicular combat games that parents probably hated way more than they hated Fallout (it’s a lot of wild, demolition-derby style action involving smashing and/or blowing up your opponents). It stars Anthony Mackie as John Doe, an effective anchor for the chaos of this lawless future America in which the roads have become battlegrounds. There’s tons of clever humor amid the frenetic car-on-car (and car-on-semi, car-on-hearse, -ice cream truck, etc.) action. Things go boom, mostly, and sometimes that’s exactly what you want—it’s the show for the 15-year-old gamer inside all of us. Stream Twisted Metal on Peacock.
Silo (2023 – )
Rebecca Ferguson stars as Juliette Nichols, an engineer who gets wrapped up in an investigation involving the local sheriff (David Oyelowo)—usual procedural stuff, except that the characters all inhabit a massive silo, 144-levels deep, protecting the remaining 10,000 humans from the allegedly poisoned world above. Those running the silo have managed to convince everyone left that only strict adherence to rules and procedures will keep them safe from the dangers outside. This is a more dour, less colorful apocalypse than the one in Fallout—it’s a prestige drama that incorporates elements of horror, mystery, and science fiction to tell human stories about fear and control. Two further seasons are coming. Stream Silo on Apple TV+.
Z Nation (2014 – 2019)
Where The Walking Dead and The Last of Us made prestige television out of the zombie apocalypse, this SyFy channel original is all about treating zombies as a campy, gory good time. Things kick off with a soldier who’s been tasked with transporting a package across country. The package in question is actually a human being, a survivor of a zombie bite who might be able to help create a vaccine (sound familiar?), but the emotional stakes are a lot lower than The Last of Us‘s tortured trek. It comes from the schlock-masters at The Asylum, purveyors of infamous B-movies like Sharknado, which should tell you all you need to know about the tone. Stream Z Nation on Peacock, Tubi, AMC+, and Shudder.
The Decameron (2024)
I’ve never been particularly convinced that an end-of-the-world narrative needs to be set in the future, and this darkly funny but surprisingly humane show offers up a slice of a real-life apocalypse. Loosely adapting Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th century story collection with hints of Bridgerton-esque swagger, we’re taken to plague-ravaged Florence, as a bunch of nobles and attendants make their way across a dangerous landscape to hole up in a countryside villa to wait out the end while draining the liquor supplies—as you would. Rules and social mores are turned upside down, particularly by servant Licisca (Tanya Reynolds), who kind of accidentally kills her lady on the way to the villa and then decides to take her place. Despite being primarily a show about how hell is other people, it makes for an entirely addictive binge experience. Stream The Decameron on Netflix.
Into the Badlands (2015 – 2019)
About 500 years from now, war has eradicated anything resembling civilization and left the planet ravaged, even as some vestiges of technology remain. Still, firearms are largely taboo given the devastation they’ve caused—allowing for an action apocalypse dominated by kick-ass martial arts combat. The Badlands, Rocky Mountains and Mississippi River are transformed into competing feudal-esque kingdoms, dominated by Marton Csokas’s creepy, over-the-top Baron Quinn and, at least initially, his chief lieutenant Sunny (Daniel Wu). Stream Into the Badlands on Prime Video and AMC+.
Scavengers Reign (2023)
This smart, impressively voice-acted, beautifully animated sci-fi epic follows the fates of the stranded survivors of a crashed interstellar cargo ship. The web of natural life on the world on which they find themselves is unusually complex, and the rules of biology they’re used to don’t seem to apply. The outer space sci-fi setting doesn’t, on the surface, have much to do with the blasted desert of Fallout, but both shows are set in imagined worlds that are intricate, colorful, and devilishly clever. Stream Scavengers Reign on HBO Max.
Snowpiercer (2020 – 2024)
Though initially feeling like an unnecessary extention of Bong Joon Ho’s allegorical post-apocalyptic film, Snowpiercer, the show, ultimately takes on a life of its own as a clever sci-fi melodrama, smartly recognizing that there are no heroes and few true villains at the end of the world—it’s mostly just people doing whatever they can to survive. In a frozen future (2026, to be precise), humanity survives on an extremely long train that circumnavigates the globe. If it stops, the power will go out and everyone (literally everyone) will die. Those who came aboard with wealth live near the front in relative luxury, while the poor live on scraps (or worse) in the train’s tail. Daveed Diggs stars as former detective Andre Layton, a “Tailie” deputized by Jennifer Connelly’s Melanie Cavill, engineer and the train’s Head of Hospitality, to solve a series of murders. The inevitable uprising that follows sets the two of them on different sides of a violent conflict, before each eventually realizes they’re just pawns of elites—same as it ever was. Stream Snowpiercer on AMC+ or buy episodes from Prime Video.
Train to the End of the World (2024)
This anime series makes clear that it definitely isn’t 5G that we need to be worried about…it’s 7G, an experimental cell network that warps reality and leaves Japan as a series of isolated settlements—it’s also caused strange mutations, including turning people into animals, and creating mind-controlling mushrooms à la The Last of Us. Discovering evidence that one of her classmates is alive outside of Tokyo, Shizuru Chikura gets some friend together and they commandeer a train to carry them through the strange new wilderness. Stream Train to the End of the World on Crunchyroll or buy episodes from Prime Video.
The Last of Us (2023 – )
Predating Fallout by just about a year, The Last of Us started what remains an extremely exclusive club of video game adaptations that click, in this case even picking up a bunch of Emmys—Fallout maybe running a bit behind in terms of major awards, but has picked up nominations for Outstanding Drama and Lead Actor Emmys, which ain’t too shabby. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey star here, at least initially, as Joel and Ellie, travelers through an apocalyptic wasteland populated by zombified humans infected by a fungus. There’s genuine suspense and expertly crafted horror in the show’s zombie threat, but it’s all built around the dynamic between Joel and Ellie, a beaten-down smuggler and the immune teenager he’s being paid to deliver to the other side of the country. Their relationship sells the premise, and makes the stakes feel very real when the zombie mushroom people come out to bite. When the show upends that cart in season two, it’s devastating. Stream The Last of Us on HBO Max.
Murderbot (2025 – )
I suppose it says something about our uniquely fun era that you can turn on the TV and take your pick of future dystopias—here we visit a hyper-capitalist future in which everything’s hunky-dory, as long as you mostly only care about money. A dark comedy based on the Hugo-Award winning book series by Martha Wells, the show stars Alexander Skarsgård is the title’s hilariously deadpan robot, a private “security construct” who’s managed to hack its way through its own programming and gain free will—which it mostly wants to use to watch its favorite streaming shows. It can’t just run off for fear of drawing attention, but the self-named Murderbot (it’s being ironic, kinda) is content to do the bare minimum when it’s assigned to a team of inexperienced and naive hippie researchers who don’t see the need for a killer security robot—at least, not until they’re enmeshed in a complicated capitalist plot in which they’re all just cogs. Stream Murderbot on Apple TV+.
Station Eleven (2021 – 2022)
The miniseries, based on the Emily St. John Mandel bestseller, was released at either the best time or the worst possible time, the story of a flu pandemic twenty years on hitting HBO square in the middle of COVID—and don’t all of our current apocalypse dramas owe just a bit to that waking nightmare? The show follows two tracks, one introducing Kirsten Raymonde, a young stage actor whose performance in a production of King Lear is cut short by the onset of a virus with a 99% fatality rate. We also visit Kirsten twenty years on, still an actor, in a world very much changed. It’s a slow-burn, picking up steam only after a couple of episodes, but ultimately, the series makes a moving case for the power of art, even (or especially) in moments when survival is on the line. Stream Station Eleven on HBO Max.
The Leftovers (2014 – 2017)
No weird mutations here; instead we get an apocalypse that looks disturbingly normal. As the series begins, around 2% of the world’s population disappears without explanation—it’s enough to upend just about everything. Politics have adapted to the new normal, religions have collapsed and reformed, and families have had to make peace with the inexplicable loss of loved ones. The first season revolves around the Garvey family led by Kevin (Justin Theroux), a sheriff whose wife (Amy Brenneman) left him to join a cult, while subsequent seasons broaden the scope to bring in other characters in other locations. Showrunner Damon Lindelof also co-created Lost, and Leftovers inherits that show’s relatively grim tone while doing it one better in sticking a landing. Stream The Leftovers on HBO Max.
The Rain (2018 – 2020)
We get a lot of Fallout-esque desert dystopias, but leave it to those melancholy Danes to center an apocalypse around precipitation. In this three-season import, a virus spread by rainfall that wipes out most of the population of Scandinavia. Siblings Simone and Rasmus emerge from their bunker six years later, setting off across Scandinavia with the hope of finding a safe haven, and maybe their father. It turns out that one of them holds the key to wiping out the virus and saving the world. It’s not the most original premise (The Last of Us game came out five years earlier), but the setting gives it a unique feel, and the series comes to a decisive ending. Stream The Rain on Netflix.
Now Apocalypse (2019)
OK, so maybe the end of days is feeling a little heavy at this point, and you’re looking for something a little brighter and a lot more gay. I got you! New Queer Cinema pioneer Greg Araki followed up his neon-tinged apocalypse in Kaboom with Now Apocalypse, a successor in spirit. Avan Jogia plays Ulysses Zane, living in sun-soaked California with his best friend Carly (Kelli Berglund), a struggling actress and sex worker. He keeps having bizarre dreams about an alien invasion that feel increasingly like they might be premonitions…or possibly just anxiety delusions brought on by too much weed. The show only lasted one season, and never quite made it to its own prophesied apocalypse, but it was definitely fun while it lasted, and definitely offers something a bit to the left of the typical dreary end-of-the-world. Stream Now Apocalypse on Tubi.
The 100 (2014 – 2020)
At seven seasons, the CW’s YA The 100 is, currently, our most deeply explored TV apocalypse, telling the story of the descendants of refugees of nuclear devastation who return to Earth from their habitat in space—to encounter the remnants of humanity who’d survived on Earth. Naturally, the first people sent to scope things out are the juvenile delinquents (better them than me, honestly), and they discover that three civilizations that have risen up in the aftermath of the apocalypse, and they are all pretty darned scary (including the inevitable cannibals). The show builds an impressive mythology over the course of its run, leading to a conclusion that’s borderline metaphysical. Buy episodes of The 100 from Prime Video.
