12 Shows Like The Walking Dead You Need To Watch

Anyone who listens to "The Fall of Civilizations" podcast knows that the apocalypse has been with humanity from the beginning. Almost every corner of the Earth stands on the ground of a fallen civilization, many that once stood at the cutting edge of human development. Perhaps it's that impermanence that makes post-apocalyptic storytelling so captivating — the idea that we could lose it all in the blink of an eye is like staring into the abyss.

Or maybe it's some primal urge to strip away all of society's constructs and just live off our own self-determination. Shows like "The Walking Dead" might depict a hard life, but at least there's no smarmy middle manager pummeling you with microaggressions while lording over your desk with panopticon eyes. There's a simplicity to watching Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride) build their relationship while taking down zombies and hunting for their own meals.

Whatever draws us to post-apocalyptic tales, binging shows like "The Walking Dead" can have a way of soothing our restless late state capitalist hearts. From eco-disasters to worldwide zombie pandemics, we just can't seem to get enough.

"The Walking Dead" ("TWD") universe continues to expand with series like "The Ones Who Live," "Daryl Dixon," and "Dead City." But "Fear the Walking Dead" ("FTWD") is really the only series in the shared universe that has its own pretty serious fandom outside of the parent series — probably owing to the completely different tone and storytelling style. Like "TWD," "FTWD" follows a group of survivors through and after the Wildfire virus outbreak. While "TWD" starts just after the outbreak in the American Southeast, "FTWD" (2015-2023) begins in Los Angeles just prior to the outbreak, following one family as they flee the city to Mexico and eventually end up in Texas.

The adventures of Rick's crew tend to focus on the group's efforts to establish a community, efforts invariably disrupted by big bad-style "Walking Dead" villains like the Governor, Negan, or Alpha. The experiences of Madison Clark's (Kim Dickens) clan tend to be much wilder, often to the point of unhinged. 

One season, they're traveling by yacht. At other points, they're inside a fundamentalist prepper community, starting a trucker-run interstate aid program, running a refinery, and getting tangled up with a Doomsday Cult run by a serial killer who triggers nuclear warheads from a beached submarine. Halfway through the series, the show takes on a neo-Western flair that somehow works, while adding "Walking Dead" character Morgan (Lennie James). And that's to say nothing of the character who gets infected by the virus — and lives to tell the tale. 

In terms of unhinged zombie series, it doesn't get any crazier than "Z Nation," Syfy's absolutely bonkers answer to "The Walking Dead" that was produced by The Asylum — the production company responsible for "Sharknado" and a whole host of mockbusters including "AVH: Alien vs. Hunter" and "The Paranormal Entity."

While the 2014-2018 series has plenty of parodic elements, "Z Nation" has a remarkably well-developed story and world-building. The series is also full of captivating anti-heroic characters like Doc (Russell Hodgkinson), whose personal expertise in recreational drugs makes him the next best thing to a surgeon, or 10K (Nat Zang), the young man with a goal to rack up 10,000 kills. And then there's Murphy (Keith Allan), the former convict who miraculously survives forced medical experimentation in prison, making him humanity's last best hope.

Guided from afar by Citizen Z (DJ Qualls), a soldier stationed at an NSA listening post in the Arctic Circle, a group of survivors vow to get Murphy through post-apocalyptic America all the way from New York to a CDC lab in California where they're meant to stop the outbreak. Along the way, we're treated to a host of strange and hilarious zombies: juggalo zombies, plant-base zombies, pharmaceutical zombies, bedazzled zombies — even a conveyor belt of zombies.

A dramatically more sober prequel series to "Z Nation," "Black Summer" (2019-2021) omits the wild zombies to focus on the dark times before society fell. The title is a reference to an event mentioned in "Z Nation" — a drought that shortly followed the original outbreak, forcing groups like the Philadelphia crew in "Philly Feast" to take up cannibalism in order to survive. Far more than just a bit of lore in the series, the legend of Black Summer provides something "The Walking Dead" universe never does: a reasonable explanation for why most apocalypse survivors turn so cynical that they just start slaughtering the other remaining survivors.

Beginning six weeks after the zombie outbreak, the series follows a woman named Rose (Jaime King) and her efforts to reunite with her daughter Anna (Zoe Marlett) after they're separated during a zombie attack. While "Black Summer" isn't a groundbreaking series and shares exactly zero characters with its parent program, it does a good job of expanding the "Z Nation" universe by diving into the story behind the Black Summer that caused so many people in the original series to lose hope. The fact that horror legend Stephen King found the series scary should be endorsement enough to make it worth watching.

Just short enough to binge in one sitting due to its unfortunate early cancellation, 2019's "Zomboat!" is a hidden zombie gem that fans of "Z Nation" will love. For those who don't know, Birmingham, England has more canals than Venice, and they're full of narrowboats — special boats designed to maneuver through shallow waters. It's a surprisingly popular housing choice, with thousands of Brits taking up residence in these narrow floating RVs.

Since zombies are notoriously bad swimmers, it makes sense for sisters Kat (Leah Brotherhead) and Jo (Cara Theobold) to flee by narrowboat when a zombie outbreak hits Birmingham. Never mind that canal boats only go about four miles an hour and the canals are hardly very wide. "Zomboat!" chronicles their slow-motion trip with mates Sunny (Hamza Jeetooa) and Amar (Ryan McKen) in bite-sized 24-minute episodes. Along the way, the quartet navigates a host of crises like a zombie stripper, a draining canal, and a dying phone battery thwarting Jo's efforts to stalk her boyfriend.

The zombies are ridiculous, and so is the premise. But the story offers a wonderfully innovative take on the zombie apocalypse — not to mention an interesting introduction to life in a narrowboat.

The critically-acclaimed TV adaptation of the post-apocalyptic POV Playstation 3 game of the same name, "The Last of Us" is the adaptation "Resident Evil" wishes it had. Unlike most zombie infections that are viral, the apocalypse-inciting pandemic behind "The Last of Us" is fungal in nature. Even freakier, it's based on a real-world fungal infection that takes over fire ants, completely transforming their behavior as it attaches to their exoskeletons before eating the insects from the inside out.

And in the world of "The Last of Us," these Cordyceps zombies — called "infected" — look super cool. Post-infection, Cordyceps victims are transformed by its yellowish fungus, mutating their heads into mushroom-like formations that appear ripped from Guillermo del Toro's freakiest dreams.

Set two decades after the global outbreak, the series follows Joel Miller's (Pedro Pascal) efforts to smuggle the immune teenager Ellie (Bella Ramsey) out of a Federal Disaster Response Agency (FEDRA)-run Quarantine Zone and across the country. Reviews for "The Last of Us" have heaped praise upon the series, from the outstanding score to the main cast's portrayals. The flashback episode "Long, Long Time," featuring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett as longtime romantic partners, was almost universally praised, leading Rolling Stone to call it "a rare glimpse of an apocalypse that's more than just misery porn; there may just be something worth fighting for." The outstanding cast also includes Kaitlyn Dever, Anna Torv, Melanie Lynskey, and Rutina Wesley.

A TNT series produced by Michael Bay, "The Last Ship" (2014-2018) deals with a different type of outbreak: a viral pandemic that manages to rapidly take down 80% of the planet. The series focuses on a group of survivors aboard the fictional U.S. Navy ship the USS Nathan James. At the time of the outbreak, the crew of the Nathan James is at work in the Arctic, unaware of the crisis until they're attacked by Russian renegades. Aboard the ship, CDC paleomicrobiologist Rachel Scott (Rhona Mitra) sets to work trying to engineer a cure and save what's left of humanity.

While "The Last Ship" doesn't excel in terms of character development and world-building, it's an interesting work of post-apocalyptic fiction told from a military fiction perspective. It's a similar premise to "Battlestar Galactica," stripped of all the complex sociopolitical and theological storytelling. For a Michael Bay production, the series is low on special effects. But the show is full of big, edge-of-your seat action moments, thanks in part to the decision to let Bren Foster choreograph his own scenes as Delta Team special forces member Wolf Taylor. 

"I think it has influenced the writing," Foster told Behind the Lens. "They've given my character a lot of physical stuff, from whether it's been scuba diving to climbing up buildings with all the poles, all the fight scenes, to giving me a bayonet, and asking me to wield a machine gun with a knife attached on the end as a weapon, taking out stunt guys."

Loosely based on a series of YA novels by Kass Morgan, "The 100" (2014-2020) is the type of young adult series that adult sci-fi fans love to watch, too. The series begins just shy of a century after Earth undergoes an apocalypse-scale nuclear war. The many survivors stuck on space stations at the time eventually combine their ships to make a larger station they call the Ark — but a few generations later, it's running out of oxygen fast. In a last-ditch effort to save as many lives as possible, Ark leadership sends 100 juvenile delinquents down to Earth before they believe it's safe to return, effectively using the kids as guinea pigs.

Mirroring the style of YA novels, every season of "The 100" tells an almost completely different story. One finds them duking it out with "Grounders" and the corrupt survivors inside Mount Weather. Other seasons find them forced underground, back into space, and at one point, battling a sentient AI that infects them like zombies. But even if it sounds ridiculous, "The 100" is a massively interesting and creative story that finds groups of survivors pitted in increasingly novel circumstances — much like another sci-fi series we've all come to know and love. 

With actors like Eliza Taylor, Richard Harmon, Henry Ian Cusick, Eve Harlow, and Alycia Debnam-Carey, "The 100" has a solid cast to go with its brilliant costumes, sets, and world-building.

A time-travel series adapted from the film of the same name, that was in turn adapted from the 1962 French short film "La Jetée," "12 Monkeys" (2015-2018) envisions the dwindling world that remains decades after a lab-engineered pandemic wipes out most of humanity. Convinced she has the key to reversing it, a scientist (Barbara Sukowa) from that bleak future sends scavenger James Cole (Aaron Stanford) back in time to stop the Army of the 12 Monkeys from creating the virus to begin with. What's meant to be a quick-and-dirty time travel fix becomes increasingly complex with each trip through the "splinter" machine, ultimately revealing the 12 Monkeys' plans to create a temporal purgatory where all of time exists at once and no one ever dies.

The series is a work of genuinely artistic science fiction with a rare hopeful message. Over the show's four-season arc, writer Terry Matalas spins a mind-bending yarn that completes its story by the end of the series, and it's one of the most satisfying endings you'll get with a time travel narrative. The entire cast delivers moving performances throughout the series, with Emily Hampshire's portrayal of the time travel-addled Jennifer Goines and Todd Stashwick's charming villain Deacon high notes in particular. Time travel legend Christopher Lloyd even makes an appearance. Fans of another Matalas-penned series, "Star Trek: Picard," will find Season 3 laden with "12 Monkeys" Easter eggs — not to mention actors who show up in both series. 

In the event of a nuclear apocalypse, it's probably best not to be in a major city. Luckily for the characters central to the CW's YA series "Jericho," the tiny town of Jericho, Kansas, is about as far from anywhere as it gets. After a nuclear attack devastates 23 United States cities, the people of Jericho are left without answers. When the residents finally get their power back on, an electromagnetic pulse knocks it out once more, disabling all of their electronics at once.

Starring Skeet Ulrich long before he became a "Riverdale" daddy and a pre-"Walking Dead" Lennie James, the series focuses on the community's recovery in the wake of these attacks. Without any state or federal infrastructure, they're forced to rebuild everything from the ground up while searching for information about what happened at the same time, and the fight over resources eventually turns ugly.

Like many shows of that era, "Jericho" (2006-2008) had a fervent fan following but couldn't pull the ratings needed to stay on the air. Although fan pressure managed to revive the series once in 2007 and the show was in talks with Netflix over a possible Season 3 as late as 2013, nothing ever materialized.

Another short-lived apocalyptic series with a fairly strong fandom, "Revolution" was set 15 years after an undisclosed event causes a permanent global power blackout in 2012. Without warning and all at once, everything powered electronically goes dead, causing airplanes to crash, trains to crash, and millions of Americans to lose their streaming video services. As it turns out, even aside from all the death and destruction, a world without electronics is tough to recover from. 

In the post-disaster era, everything goes to pot as militias take over and warring factions seek answers about the nature of the great outage and what, if anything, can be done to reverse it. The two-season Bad Robot series boasted Giancarlo Esposito, Jim Beaver, and Elizabeth Mitchell among its cast and was created by Eric Kripke, the writer-producer behind "Supernatural" and "The Boys." Although the show didn't get a chance to delve too deeply into its lore, the introduction of conscious nanites promised an interesting payoff. A digital comic released by DC Comics in 2015 continued the story.

While it's not necessarily a post-apocalyptic series, "From" (which premiered in 2022) might as well be — and it's got all the terror of a zombie story. In the world of this dark MGM+ horror series, its central characters are just driving along when they find themselves trapped in a small community where efforts to leave just bring them back to the same felled tree lying across the road. No matter where they come from across the United States, everyone sees the tree.

Much like "The Walking Dead" and other good post-apocalyptic stories, the people of Fromville struggle to maintain some semblance of normalcy in a world that seems increasingly unfamiliar. But the truly terrifying part is what comes out at night. Each night after dark, the community in "From" is under siege by monsters that first appear human right down to their smiles, mere seconds before gutting their prey and then picking it clean right down to the bone. Even if they don't come inside unless invited, there's a constant threat that someone will snap and open a window — something people seem to do a lot more often than one might think. And as it turns out, the monsters are just the beginning in this strange place.

Decades before Rick Grimes slept through his zombie apocalypse, George R. Stewart dreamed up the O.G. Rip Van Winkle in his 1949 post-apocalyptic novel "Earth Abides," an epic work of eco-fiction that imagines how quickly Earth will bounce back without humanity dragging it down, while positing a way we could continue to hang on.

The 2024 MGM+ series is a fairly solid adaptation of the novel that takes place over a lifetime, often telling its story across sweeping time jumps. Like the novel, "Earth Abides" follows Alexander Ludwig's Isherwood ("Ish") after a near-deadly snake bite causes him to miss a devastating global pandemic that kills all but a very marginal fraction of humanity within just a couple of weeks. Eventually, Ish meets a woman named Emma (Jessica Frances Dukes) and starts a family. As the years pass, they add a few more people to their fold little by little.

But the central relationships aren't the focus of this story. Instead, it's the man vs. nature struggle to survive as the Earth gradually resets in a story that resembles a fictional depiction of "Life After People," the documentary that imagines Earth's progress after humanity disappears. Battling plagues of rats, water shortages, and eventually, societal issues once more, Ish and Emma find navigating the post-technology world is both difficult and rewarding.