15 post-apocalyptic TV shows to fill the void left by The Last Of Us

The Leftovers doesn’t look or feel like other post-apocalyptic shows. That’s because, in The Leftovers, the post-apocalypse doesn’t look that different from real life. People still go to work, have relationship problems, and deal with family drama. In many ways, the world following the disappearance of 2 percent of the population resembles the world we live in today. Three years from the onset of the COVID pandemic and nearly 7 million deaths later, we’re living in a post-apocalypse of our own, where the daily struggle to move on is counterbalanced by the reality that we’ll never truly move on.

It’s what makes The Leftovers a remarkable achievement as it meets a moment we never saw coming. The show re-frames the genre not as an adventure but as an endurance test. There will always be guilty remnants, standing silently and smoking their cigarettes, to remind us of what we lost and the grief millions feel. At least we have The Leftovers to help make sense of it all. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Station Eleven hit incredibly close to home when it ran during the pandemic. It’s also perhaps the most poignant and thoughtful entry on this list. Scenes of the early outbreak mimicked our reality (ominous coughing, warnings to stay six feet apart), but flashes to the future imagined a quieter, emptier post-outbreak world. The critically acclaimed limited series shares some of the genre’s hallmarks—the lack of technology, repurposing the bones of the old world to build the new, even the hypnotically charismatic cult leader. What’s unique to this show is the emphasis on community building and the necessity of art for survival, themes that infused this post-apocalyptic landscape with hope. Plus, it’s gorgeously acted, with standout performances from Himesh Patel and Mackenzie Davis. [Mary Kate Carr]

Way back in 2015 (that’s weird to say, right?), The Last Man On Earth delivered the most promising network-comedy pilot that we’d seen in quite a while. That’s a big feat, especially considering it pretty much only consists of, yes, the last man on Earth—that is, Phil, the future Tandy, played by the great Will Forte, who also wrote the episode—fooling around by his lonesome and going all Cast Away on a bunch of balls (or “buddies,” as he calls them). More people, of course, would join the show (shoutout to an excellent Kristen Schaal), which proved that even end times could be very funny. [Tim Lowery]

Like many other shows on this list, Sweet Tooth has its origins in another medium—in this case, a comic book series by Jeff Lemire. It mostly takes place a decade after a deadly virus killed a significant portion of the human population, with a parallel narrative set shortly after the outbreak. It’s understandable if it feels too real, but this pandemic apocalypse has an interesting twist: At the same time the virus emerged, women started giving birth to human-animal hybrid babies.

When the story begins, no one knows how (or even if) the two events are connected. Like The Last Of Us, it employs the lone wolf and cub trope (the animal comparison is especially apt here) as we follow the journey of a young hybrid boy named Gus (Christian Convery), who’s part deer, and his reluctant protector-companion Big Man, a former football player still coping with a traumatic past. Netflix has thankfully renewed the series for a second season. [Cindy White]

Christopher Keyser’s Lord Of The Flies-esque drama isn’t necessarily post-apocalyptic in the traditional sense, but it carries that ethos. Set in a small Connecticut town, The Society follows a group of teenagers who return home from a canceled field trip to find out everyone else has disappeared. The world has vanished, so there’s no internet or phones—but a random dense forest appears around them. Left with limited resources, the teens must figure out how to survive as they struggle to form a community.

The Society is a complex coming-of-age tale as much as it is a post-apocalyptic story, so it shares that principle with TLOU’s Ellie. There are no zombies or hybrid human-animal creatures, but there’s plenty of drama to fuel the story. Fair warning: Netflix reversed its renewal during the pandemic, so the first and only season ends on a cliffhanger. But it’s still worth catching The Society for a thrilling mystery and ace performances from Kathryn Newton, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, and Olivia DeJonge. [Saloni Gajjar]

Skeet Ulrich leads Jericho for ... all of two seasons because, sadly, CBS canceled the cult hit despite many fan campaigns to preserve the series. The post-apocalyptic drama takes place after a nuclear attack destroys 23 American cities, effectively isolating the small titular town from the rest of the world. Ulrich’s Jake Green, who returned to his hometown of Jericho at the absolute wrong time, becomes the town’s de facto leader during this crisis while the citizenry learn how to survive and restart their world without power (literally and figuratively). Although there’s an overarching mystery about who was behind the nuclear attacks and military operations, Jericho stays on theme by navigating issues like community building and the ways humans rely on each other during tough times to make it through. [Saloni Gajjar]

Daybreak is an admittedly bizarre but highly underrated zombie teen dramedy. Based on the comic book series, the one-season-and-done series chronicles Josh Wheeler (Colin Ford), a 17-year-old student searching for his missing British girlfriend, Sam Dean (Sophie Simnett), in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. He teams up with a ragtag crew to survive the horde and other enemies, including Matthew Broderick’s delirious villain. The show provides a smart blend of rom-com, YA, and post-apocalyptic drama and also offers a fun spin on zombies—are they fully undead, or can some of them find their humanity again, like Krysta Rodriguez’s Ms. Crumble? Now if only Netflix had given it another season to flesh out the premise. [Saloni Gajjar]

Neon Genesis Evangelion takes place 15 years after the Second Impact, a cataclysmic event that shifted the Earth’s axis and wiped out roughly half the world’s population. Subsequent wars and climate change leave the planet ravaged, and it only gets worse when giant, monstrous beings referred to as Angels begin appearing in Japan. The cause of the Second Impact and what the Angels want are major plot points, yes, but the Japanese anime series’ biggest draws are its gorgeously choreographed fights between the giant mechas, Evangelions, and the Angels. [Jen Lennon]

Revolution taps into the very real horror of what would happen if the world lost access to electricity. The post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama from Eric Kripke (The Boys, Supernatural) examines a world that’s said goodbye to everything from computers to planes to cars. While the “blackout” took place in 2012, Revolution begins in 2027 when new governments and public orders have been created in the U.S. The show is inexplicably compelling as central characters trudge through political warfare, rebellions, and gritty landscapes in their fight for survival and a search for electricity. The series also boasts an impressive ensemble, including Giancarlo Esposito, Billy Burke, Elizabeth Mitchell, and Zak Orth. [Saloni Gajjar]

12 Monkeys has absolutely no right to be as good as it is. Taking a movie and stretching it out into a series is always a dicey proposition, as a lot of shows have found out. Still, by using the film as a jumping-off point to tell its own unique story, the show quietly became an acclaimed sci-fi TV experience. Much of that is thanks to the fleshed-out characters, a ragtag group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic future who travel back in time to try to stop the release of a deadly virus. Emily Hampshire (Schitt’s Creek) shines as a brilliant but unstable mathematician, and Todd Stashwick (The Originals) seems to be having the time of his life as the sleazy, dangerous Deacon. [Jen Lennon]

Cowboy Bebop may not seem like a typical post-apocalyptic show—it fits more comfortably into the neo-noir and space Western genres—but make no mistake: Spike Spiegel & Co. are jetting across the galaxy and working as intergalactic bounty hunters because Earth has become a crater-riddled hellscape after the moon exploded and rained asteroids down on the planet below. The Astral Gate Accident killed 4.7 billion people, and even though the anime mostly relegates the incident’s effects to the background, it still informs the tone, setting, and character backstories.

There are no monsters here except the shadows of past regrets. The fights for survival are more of the “we’re out of food, money, and gas” variety than “a mutant creature is trying to infect me.” Still, the beautifully formed characters and fully realized world share a common thematic language with more traditional post-apocalyptic shows. [Jen Lennon]

The 100 was defined by many big swings (multiple genocides, nuclear events, sealed bunkers protecting the last of humanity, trips back and forth from space, and on and on). It didn’t always work, but when it did, it was network television’s most imaginative, expansive (and underrated!) drama. Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor) went from an idealistic leader to a world-weary antihero with blood on her hands, trying and (for the most part) failing to create a better world than the one that had been destroyed. The series quickly evolved from a typical CW teen soap into a dark, challenging exploration of morality—even if it did veer entirely off the rails by the final season. [Mary Kate Carr]

Part of the appeal of post-apocalyptic TV is that it allows for a real exploration of the, let’s call it, post-post-apocalypse: the moment when all involved look around at their broken and dying world and ask themselves, “What do we build here now?” Such was the appeal of Rockne S. O’Bannon and Syfy’s plucky little space Western Defiance, which saw an Earth ravaged by alien invasions and warfare attempting to build itself back up from the rubble. The result approximated Deadwood Except Some Of The People Have Weird Stuff On Their Faces: hard-scrabble lives, occasional threats of existential re-imperiling, and a society of frontier survivors fighting to create something new in the shadow of a far-future version of St. Louis’ Gateway Arch. Sometimes goofy but also undeniably affecting, Defiance asked the hardest and most important apocalyptic question of them all: What comes next? [William Hughes]

It can be hard to call the updated re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica a post-apocalyptic show since, for the crew of that titular battled old space cruiser, the apocalypse never really stopped. Nuked nigh out of existence, pursued at every juncture, and torn apart by enemies both real and imagined, the crew of the Battlestar lived, for four seasons and a variety of spin-off mini-series and movies, in the midst of the ending of their world. No one’s going to argue that Battlestar Galactica didn’t take some big, stupid swings in its five years on the air—we’ll never be able to hear “All Along The Watchtower” without a hint of an eyeroll ever again—but few shows have ever tried to grapple as honestly with the crushing weight of despair that comes from surviving something on this scale. It’s the rare apocalyptic TV show where survivor guilt and PTSD can score a body count nearly as high as the oncoming robot horde, and it remains, to this day, capable of moments of sublime beauty and grace as a consequence. [William Hughes]

The world slept on Now Apocalypse when it aired for one season on Starz in 2019, but you still have time to catch up. The farcical comedy follows Ulysses (Avan Jogia), Carly (Kelli Berglund), and Ford (Beau Mirchoff) as they navigate sex and fame in Los Angeles. However, Ulysses is plagued by premonitory dreams of end times. But are they real or just drug-fueled delusions? Now Apocalypse uses this device to tell fascinating and surprisingly raunchy stories while pondering our existence. [Saloni Gajjar]