10 Best Post-Apocalyptic TV Shows Of All Time
The world may have come to an end, but at least there's something awesome to watch on television!
Typically, feature films are the medium storytellers prefer when a post-apocalyptic world is the name of the game, as the Matrix Trilogy, Mad Max franchise, and even WALL-E demonstrate all too well. Those work great for short bursts of entertainment, but sometimes a story requires more time to be told correctly.
When that's the case, the only option left to filmmakers is television, and over nearly a century of content being blasted at viewers all over the world from sets in their homes, there have been some amazing post-apocalyptic shows fans have enjoyed.
Granted, not every show ends up getting to a natural conclusion, and many don't get out of their first season. Despite this, there are plenty of post-apocalyptic series to choose from when trying to determine which ones are the best series the genre and medium have to offer.
Some of the best entries on this list manage to set the story in a wasteland, but that often falls behind the characters and storylines that brilliantly describe the narrative. If the focus of a show isn't the fact that the world came to an end and instead focuses on the people who are still around, odds are, it has a place on this list.
10. The 100
The 100 first premiered in March 2014, and the series ran for an impressive seven seasons, ending in mid-July 2020 after a total of 93 episodes. The series is set 97 years after a devastating nuclear holocaust kills nearly all life on Earth, leaving very few survivors in orbit aboard a space station called the Ark.
After three generations lived and died on the Ark, the station has reached capacity, so 100 juvenile detainees are selected to head down to the planet to see if the world has become hospitable to human life once more.
When they arrive, they quickly discover that humanity survived the apocalypse, and there are three distinct groups of people alive on the planet. The Grounders are the somewhat disparate clans of people who survived the apocalypse, the Reapers are Grounders who became cannibalistic, and the Mountain Men were descendents from the people who locked themselves away before the end of the world.
The series was widely beloved by critics, which is evident from its Rotten Tomato scores. Four of the seven seasons hold a 100%, while the remaining three have similarly high ratings, which gives the series a total aggregate score of 92%.