5 apocalypse shows harsher, grittier, and bleaker than The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead may be the ultimate post-apocalyptic franchise: the original show, about survivors trying to unite after a zombie plague destroys civilization, ran for 11 seasons, and that’s without counting the numerous spinoffs. A great many characters die brutally in that span, and they were just as likely to be killed by their fellow human beings as by the undead. It was a very grim show.

But that doesn’t mean it has no competition. There are actually a ton of shows set after the end of the world, and they all tend to be pretty gritty, for obvious reasons; it’s hard to make that subject sunny. If what you want is to watch a show that has you sobbing into your armrest over the futility and darkness of it all, we have recommendations.

Battlestar Galactica

In space, no one can hear you have a crippling existential crisis

Battlestar Galactica begins with an apocalyptic bang: the great majority of the human race has been killed off by murderous robots known as Cylons, and the remaining few are wandering the cosmos looking for a new home. It’s a sad and lonely life for the last several humans left alive, and the show makes sure we know it by introducing depressing plot twists after depressing plot twists, backing our heroes into a corner, and then throwing rocks at them. Every time humanity thinks it’s turned a corner, it ends up in a dead end, and even in the series finale, when it looks like things are finally going to turn around, it’s hinted that we humans have learned nothing and are about to repeat the same mistakes.

At first glance, Battlestar Galactica looks like it’s going to be a space opera like Star Wars or a mind-bending sci-fi adventure like Farscape, and it does share some things in common with those series, but Galactica distinguishes itself by being unrelentingly bleak. It seems to be fundamentally pessimistic about humanity’s ability to improve itself, which provides a fascinating emotional undertow that runs beneath the whole story.

Release Date: 2003 – 2003-00-00
Network: SyFy
Directors: Michael Rymer
Writers: Ronald D. Moore

Barclay Hope

Transport Pilot
Edward James Olmos

Commander Adama
Katee Sackhoff

Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace
Mary McDonnell

President Laura Roslin

The Handmaid’s Tale

Enter the sexist military dictatorship

In The Walking Dead, civilization collapses, and people have to rebuild it; a lot of folks turn to brutality, but there are some who hold onto hope and happiness. In The Handmaid’s Tale, civilization is threatened thanks to a sudden and severe birthrate crisis, but instead of collapsing, it’s restructured into something much worse: a slave state where fertile women are kept as “handmaids,” ruled over by a patriarchal military dictatorship.

This is every bit as devastating as a zombie apocalypse, but subtler and more insidious. Instead of rebuilding society, handmaids like Offred (Elisabeth Moss) must try to topple an all-powerful, unjust one from the lowest rung on the ladder. It’s a frighteningly hopeless situation, and the show never stops coming up with new ways to torment the characters. Even at the very end of the show, the military dictatorship still stands, although perhaps it’ll finally come down in the upcoming spinoff series The Testaments.

Release Date: 2017 – 2025-00-00
Network: Hulu
Showrunner: Bruce Miller
Directors: Mike Barker, Kari Skogland, Daina Reid, Reed Morano, Floria Sigismondi, Jeremy Podeswa, Kate Dennis, Richard Shepard, Amma Asante, Christina Choe, Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Bradley Whitford, Dearbhla Walsh, Liz Garbus
Writers: Kira Snyder, Eric Tuchman, Yahlin Chang, John Herrera, Jacey Heldrich, Dorothy Fortenberry, Marissa Jo Cerar, Lynn Renee Maxcy

Elisabeth Moss

June Osborne / Offred / Ofjoseph
Yvonne Strahovski

Serena Joy Waterford
Ann Dowd

Aunt Lydia / Miss Clements
Madeline Brewer

Janine Lindo / Ofwarren / Ofdaniel / Ofhoward

The Last of Us

You know it’s serious when even the main character dies

I’m trying to avoid stacking this list with wall-to-wall zombie shows, but we’ve got to at least have one. Next to The Walking Dead, The Last of Us is the zombie show that’s commanded the most attention in recent years, and for good reason. Based on Naughty Dog’s video game series, it’s bleak with a capital ‘B.’ We begin our adventure looking through the eyes of Joel Miller (Pedro Pascal), who loses his daughter at the beginning of the outbreak. Years later, he’s become a hardened survivor, but gets a bit of his humanity back when he bonds with a young girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsey).

The second season is when things get truly diabolical. Early in the season (last chance to avoid spoilers), a new character named Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) brutally murders Joel, in revenge for him unthinkingly killing her father at the end of season one. Ellie goes on a revenge quest against Abby and ends up losing a lot of her humanity, not to mention putting her friends in mortal danger.

That’s how The Last of Us tops The Walking Dead when it comes to harshness; even at its most pessimistic, TWD never killed off lead character Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln). The upcoming third season of The Last of Us will muddy the moral waters further as our perspective switches to Abby. If you can’t wait that long, there are a lot of shows like The Last of Us out there to help you through this gap period.

Release Date: January 15, 2023
Network: HBO
Showrunner: Craig Mazin
Directors: Craig Mazin, Peter Hoar, Jeremy Webb, Ali Abbasi, Mark Mylod, Stephen Williams, Jasmila Žbanić, Liza Johnson, Nina Lopez-Corrado
Writers: Neil Druckmann, Craig Mazin

Into the Night

Anybody got SPF 1,000,000?

The Last of Us is a very well-known show. In the interest of balance, we present Into the Night, a Belgian Netflix series about a group of people who happen to be aboard a plane when the unthinkable happens: the sun starts emitting deadly gamma rays that kill any lifeform they touch. Everybody aboard the plane has to work together to make it to an underground bunker, dealing with low fuel, irradiated food, and other problems along the way.

Into the Night ran for two seasons, and it must be said that the first is better. But the show deserves a spot on this list on account of its central premise being so unremittingly bleak and creative: the sun, the giver of all life on Earth, suddenly turns into the most vicious killer the world has ever known. Not only are the few people left alive now in mortal danger, but even if they survive, their lives as they knew them are over. It doesn’t get much more hopeless than that.

Release Date: 2020 – 2021-00-00
Network: Netflix
Directors: Dirk Verheye
Writers: Jason George

Silo

Bury your hopes in the ground

Silo is one of several great sci-fi series airing on Apple TV+, which is swiftly overtaking HBO as the new home for prestige TV. When the series starts, all we know is that what’s left of humanity lives in a bunker deep underground; the surface is toxic, and to venture onto it means death. Silo is unique among post-apocalyptic shows in that it starts long after the apocalypse has happened, and people have grown up in this horrible new reality.

But things can always get worse. While our main character Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) ventures onto the surface, the people in the silo start dividing into camps and fighting each other, underlining a theme that turns up again and again in these kinds of series: man is the real monster. In the upcoming third season, it looks like we’ll find out exactly what happened to the world to make it like this now. Spoiler: We did it to ourselves.

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We love the apocalypse

People love stories about what happens after the world ends. Oftentimes, the bleaker the story, the better the watching. Maybe we like imagining what we would do in that sort of situation, or maybe it’s cathartic to visit a world where people have to rely on their primal instincts. Maybe we just like despair. Whatever the reason, people love this stuff, they do, and I foresee many more iterations on the theme before we finally get tired of it.