Prime Video just wrapped up the second season of Fallout, its post-apocalyptic drama based on the Fallout video games that have been coming out since 1997. Our heroes (such as they are) found themselves in New Vegas, a dilapidated shell of the city it once was, but still full of people who love a good bet. Will they return order to the wasteland? Will the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) find his family?
We won’t get the answers to those questions for a good long while, since producing a new season of a show this complicated takes time. But in the meanwhile, there are lots of other post-apocalyptic TV series out there to help you scratch that itch.
Road rage after the end of the world
Twisted Metal may not be the best post-apocalyptic show out there, but we’re starting with it because it has a few key things in common with Fallout. First, it’s also based on a video game, in this case the vehicular car combat series that Sony has been putting out since the ’90s. Second, it mixes drama and pitch-black comedy in a way that may remind people of Fallout.
In Twisted Metal, we mainly follow John Doe (Anthony Mackie), a motor-mouthed delivery driver charged with carrying a mysterious package across a bleak expanse known as the Wasteland, another thing the show has in common with Fallout. He’ll meet all kinds of colorful characters along the way, including a huge psycho in a clown mask who drives an ice cream truck across the Divided States of America, stalking his prey.
- Release Date
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July 27, 2023
- Network
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Peacock
- Directors
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Jude Weng, Bill Benz
- Writers
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Grant DeKernion, Francesca Gailes, Alyssa Forleiter, Shaun Diston, Becca Black, Alison Tafel
- Franchise(s)
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Twisted Metal
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Nuufolau Joel Seanoa
Sweet Tooth
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Will Arnett
Sweet Tooth (voice)
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Into the Badlands
No guns, lots of fists
Slightly more serious is Into the Badlands, a Netflix show about a future where war has left the world a husk of what it used to be. Cars have survived but guns are shunning, leaving our hero Sunny (Daniel Wu) to enforce what little law there is left with his martial arts abilities, which he does at the behest of one of the warlords — called barons — who rule what’s left of the world.
The world-building and action scenes in Into the Badlands are top-notch; if you’re the kind of person who obsessed over the complicated fantasy world in Game of Thrones, you’ll find a lot to like here. The plot, which involves Sunny protecting a teenager (Aramis Knight) with a dark secret, is a little more prosaic, but still more than enough to pull you through the show’s three seasons.
- Release Date
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2015 – 2019-00-00
- Network
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AMC
- Showrunner
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Miles Millar
Silo
If Lucy never left the bunker
Silo is one of several fantastic sci-fi shows on Apple TV+, which has made a name for itself as a streaming service that really values genre TV. Silo is about a world where everyone is forced to live in vast underground bunkers, since the air above was rendered poisonous by something that happened so long ago everyone has forgotten what it was. It’s sort of the dramatic version of the Vaults from Fallout.
We follow engineer-turned-sheriff Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) as she tries to keep the peace and get to the bottom of what really happened all those years ago. The upcoming third season will jump back in time to clue us in, before a fourth season jumps back to Juliette’s story and wraps the whole thing up.
- Release Date
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May 5, 2023
- Showrunner
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Graham Yost
- Directors
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Morten Tyldum, David Semel
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Rebecca Ferguson
Juliette Nichols
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Tim Robbins
Bernard Holland
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Harriet Walter
Martha Walker
Z Nation
The silly zombie show
If we’re talking about post-apocalyptic TV series, we have to include a couple of zombie shows, right? Z Nation ran for five seasons on SyFy, and so far as zombie series go is pretty light-hearted. The plot revolves around a group of people trying to get a guy named Alvin Walker from New York to a lab in California, since he’s the only person known to have survived a zombie bite and it’s hoped his antibodies could be used to synthesize a cure.
And that produces some intense drama…but we also get stuff like a “zombienado,” which is what it sounds like; and celebrity cameos from the likes of author George R.R. Martin, who is forced to sign books forever as a member of the living dead. Z Nation is a solid zombie show that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
- Release Date
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2014 – 2018-00-00
- Network
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SyFy
The Last of Us
The incredibly serious zombie show
Weirdly enough, The Last of Us has almost the exact same plot as Z Nation, at least in its first season: hardened survivor Joel (Pedro Pascal) is charged with escorting the young Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across a zombie-infested United States and getting her to a lab, since she’s the only known person to have survived a zombie bite and it’s hope her immunity can be studied and turned into a cure. But while Z Nation gets goofy with it, The Last of Us keeps things deadly serious, with the bond between Joel and Ellie growing closer only to be threatened at every turn.
The second season of The Last of Us gets even more brutal, and even though it let some fans down, the show itself is a bold project that deserves to be watched ahead of a third and final season headed our way soon.
- Release Date
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January 15, 2023
- Network
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HBO
- Showrunner
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Craig Mazin
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Bella Ramsey
Ellie Williams
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John Hannah
Dr. Newman – Scientist #2
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Station Eleven
Still the gold standard for post-apocalyptic sci-fi
Station 11 is the rare post-apocalyptic show that isn’t preoccupied with violence and brutality. It’s about a group of actors who travel a post-apocalyptic United States putting on performances for the people who remain after a deadly pandemic wiped out much of humanity. The characters go through hardships, but Station 11 has a much more hopeful tone than you’ll usually find in the genre. Watch this one as a break in between The Last of Us and Silo. Plus, at only one season long, it won’t take you forever to finish.
- Release Date
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2021 – 2022-00-00
- Network
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HBO Max
- Directors
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Hiro Murai, Helen Shaver, Jeremy Podeswa, Lucy Tcherniak
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Mackenzie Davis
Kirsten Raymonde
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Himesh Patel
Jeevan Chaudhary
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Matilda Lawler
Young Kirsten
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David Wilmot
Clark Thompson
Mad Max
Not a TV show, don’t care
The Mad Max movies have been coming out since the 1970s and somehow just keep getting better. They take place in a world where wars over resources have reduced the world to ruin, with warlords jealously ruling over their patches of land. And there’s a huge emphasis on crazy vehicular combat, making this like a more stylized version of Twisted Metal.
The high watermark of the series is probably 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road, where the title character (Tom Hardy) deals with a crazed warlord named Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). The action scenes have to be seen to be believed.
And no, Mad Max isn’t a TV series, but it was impossible to leave such an iconic post-apocalyptic series off the list. Plus, there’s word that HBO is working on a Mad Max TV show, so it might not be the odd entry out on this list before long.
- Release Date
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May 15, 2015
- Runtime
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121 minutes
- Director
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George Miller
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Tom Hardy
Max Rockatansky
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Charlize Theron
Imperator Furiosa
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-
Hugh Keays-Byrne
Immortan Joe
Beyond the wastelands
I’m not sure why we so enjoy watching movies and TV shows about what happens after the world ends, but we definitely do; otherwise there wouldn’t be so much post-apocalyptic entertainment to choose from. Still, if you like your sci-fi without glimpses of our grim future, there are lots of big shows coming your way in 2026 you may want to keep an eye on.
