8 Greatest Post-Apocalyptic Shows From The Last Decade

The post-apocalyptic genre has made a comeback in the past decade. The Walking Dead made zombie hordes and societal collapse all the rage in the mid-2010s, and then, of course, in 2020, we all lived through an apocalyptic event of our own. The COVID pandemic paved the way for post-apocalyptic stories like Silo and The Last of Us and Fallout and Station Eleven, which were all made by people living in their own post-apocalyptic world, with their own post-apocalyptic malaise.

Some post-apocalyptic shows have offered a surprisingly hopeful look at the end-times — the aforementioned Station Eleven tells us that, even at the end of the world, the show must go on — while some are punishingly bleak and depressing, like Hulu’s timely adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. So, slip into a radiation suit, grab a melee weapon, and let’s take a look at the best post-apocalyptic TV shows from the past decade.

8 The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon

Around a decade ago, The Walking Dead went from being one of the most popular shows in the world to being a niche interest for only the most diehard fans. After Negan caved in Glenn’s skull with a baseball bat, a lot of viewers tuned out and never came back. The ones who did stick around mostly gave up after the flagship show was driven into the ground and the larger cinematic universe reached its umpteenth spinoff.

But, amid the slew of Walking Dead spinoffs we’ve seen over the past decade, amid the oversaturation of that franchise, there’s been one diamond in the rough. The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon was a breath of fresh air when it debuted with an exciting Paris-set adventure, and it only got even better when Carol joined him in season 2. Season 3 might’ve been the best season yet, sending Daryl and Carol to Spain for a spaghetti western-flavored adventure.

7 12 Monkeys

12 Monkeys is a TV adaptation of the Terry Gilliam-directed cult classic of the same name, which was itself a feature-length reimagining of La Jetée. The movie was all about a convict being sent back in time from a post-apocalyptic future to prevent the release of the virus that would destroy civilization. The TV series tells the same story, but it has the freedom to split its time between the past and future.

It makes the plot significantly more complicated, but it also has the time to make the characters significantly more complex and well-rounded. There’s no one in the cast of the TV show with the star power of a Brad Pitt or a Bruce Willis, but there are some wonderful actors in the series’ ensemble.

6 Fallout

Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy first made their names as TV showrunners when they took Michael Crichton’s Westworld, a glorified B-movie about a robotic cowboy chasing an everyman tourist, and turned it into a deeply existential, philosophical HBO drama about the ethics of creating sentient A.I. After Westworld’s unceremonious cancellation, Nolan and Joy hopped over to Amazon and did it again.

This time, they brought their intellectual touch to the Fallout video game franchise, a series of post-apocalyptic RPGs where aesthetic trumps logic and the primary goal is to kill mutants. In the Fallout games, the player determines the story with their own actions and choices, so it was a tall order to write one single, linear Fallout story, but Nolan and Joy have nailed it. They’re telling a few separate Fallout stories, across a few separate factions, all at the same time, and they’re all compelling (especially The Ghoul’s).

5 Station Eleven

Station Eleven was a surprisingly hopeful take on the end of the world. Set 20 years after a flu pandemic has ravaged the human race and made civilized society a thing of the past, Station Eleven revolves around a traveling troupe of performers who survive by putting on shows. During the course of their travels, they run afoul of a violent cult whose leader might have a connection to their past.

Based on Emily St. John Mandel’s novel of the same name, Station Eleven is a thematically rich look at the art of storytelling itself, and the triumph of the creative spirit. The show must go on, even in the end-times.

4 The Handmaid's Tale

The most haunting thing about Margaret Atwood’s seminal dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale is that, although the story takes place in a terrifying imagined future, she didn’t include anything in that future that wasn’t already happening. The Handmaid’s Tale is set in a draconian patriarchal society where women are owned by men, and the titular “handmaids” are essentially natal slaves whose sole purpose is to bear children for their male overlords.

Hulu’s TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale arrived at a shockingly prescient time. In 2017, under the first Trump administration, when women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy were being thrown into question, the totalitarian, theonomic government of Gilead didn’t feel too far from the present-day United States.

3 The Last Of Us

After turning a real-life apocalyptic event into a TV masterpiece with Chernobyl, Craig Mazin set his sights on the fictitious apocalypse of The Last of Us games. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey put a fresh spin on Joel and Ellie’s familiar father-daughter dynamic, Mazin and the games’ creator Neil Druckmann used the freedom of television (and a blockbuster HBO budget) to expand the worldbuilding and the backstory, and the best production designers and VFX artists in the world brought Naughty Dog’s fungus-ridden wasteland to life in spectacular fashion.

The Last of Us season 1 was a pitch-perfect adaptation of the first game, and a great introduction to this story for new audiences, and then season 2 began to adapt the behemoth that is The Last of Us Part II. It stumbled a bit in that second season, as subtext went out the window and all the biggest twists got bafflingly spoiled upfront, but that first season is still strong enough to hold up the entire series.

2 Silo

Along with Severance and For All Mankind, Silo helped to solidify Apple TV as the home of smart, original, thought-provoking science fiction. Based on the book trilogy by Hugh Howey, Silo takes place in a dystopian future where the remnants of humanity are living in a giant underground silo. The silo has 144 levels, so there’s plenty of room to hide deep, dark secrets.

Rebecca Ferguson stars as an engineer who becomes embroiled in the mysteries of the silo, and gives a typically brilliant performance at the helm of a sprawling ensemble. Silo is an intoxicating blend of typical post-apocalyptic sci-fi and intriguing conspiracy thriller.

1 Pluribus

The most original and profound vision of the apocalypse we’ve seen in the past decade — by far — is Vince Gilligan’s gonzo sci-fi chiller Pluribus. Pluribus feels like a Twilight Zone episode that never has to end. Rhea Seehorn anchors the series with a typically enrapturing turn as one of the few human beings that are immune to a strangely benevolent alien hive mind that’s possessed most of the Earth’s population.

This epidemic of peace and happiness, at the expense of humanity’s own agency, is a fascinating what-if scenario. It’s an apocalypse, an alien invasion, and a moral quandary all rolled into one, and Gilligan has used Carol Sturka’s story to offer a unique perspective on loneliness and the need for human contact.