Dystopian fiction has always been a crucial player in the science fiction and horror genres, but in the 21st century it's truly risen up to become its own dominant category. Here you'll find the absolute best of TV dystopia, ranging from zombie hellscapes to AI apocalypses to smaller pitfalls, like societies fully dominated by social media points or worlds where everything you see gets recorded in your brain like video files.
Massive plagues, nuclear winters, robot uprisings, time travel paranoia, and people vanishing into thin air -- these 19 TV shows (plus one miniseries) represent the cleverest, scariest (and often most poignant) -- dystopian stories ever told. Some are post-apocalyptic while some are just people in an office with a microchip in their head that's split their consciousness. All we're looking for is a dark vision of the future, near or far, that crackles with intensity, intrigue, and imagination.
If movies are what you seek, however, then check out the Top 10 Apocalypse Movies of All Time and the 6 Post-Apocalyptic Movies You've Probably Never Seen. Heck, IGN readers even voted on their Favorite Post-Apocalyptic World from Movies and TV!
But if it's TV you're after, then continue on as we dig into Fallout, Severance, The Walking Dead, The Handmaid's Tale, The Last of Us, and more. Here are the Top 20 Dystopian TV Shows of All Time!
20. Twisted Metal
We'll kick the list off with some riotous carnage. 2024's Twisted Metal adaptation, from Zombieland's Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, was exactly the type of violent silliness that was called for (and exactly what the Borderlands movie should have been, for what it's worth). Anthony Mackie, Stephanie Beatriz (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Encanto), and the tag team combo of Samoa Joe and Will Arnett (body and voice for Sweet Tooth) star in this clever and goofy showcase of a world of walled-off cities and expendable couriers used to drive and deliver packages across the dangerous post-apocalypse wasteland.
Watch the first season of Twisted Metal on Peacock. Season 2 is coming this summer.
19. Paradise
The newest show on this list -- on which there are actually a good number of recent series -- is Hulu's Paradise. And without giving too much away for those who haven't caught the first season, let's just say that it's a White House murder whodunnit? amidst the backdrop of an extinction level event. Emmy-winner Sterling K. Brown reunites with This is Us creator Dan Fogelman for one of the best mystery box shows since Lost went off the air. Playing trusted Secret Service agent Xavier Collins to James Marsden's affable President Cal Bradford, Brown plays both sides of the deep conspiracy coin amidst a backdrop of a world-ending catastrophe. Julianne Nicholson and Sarah Shahi also star.
Watch the first season of Paradise on Hulu. Season 2 has been greenlit.
18. Into the Badlands
Only a few shows presented here actually kick ass on a visceral, violent level, and Into the Badlands, which comprises some truly superior fight choreography, leads that particular pack. From Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville, Wednesday, Shanghai Noon), this from-the-ashes actionfest shows us the world 500 years from now, ruined by war, where a U.S. territory known as the Badlands is ruled by Barons and dominated by blade and melee weapons (guns are a no no). Daniel Wu plays one of the realm's most lethal warriors, caught up in all of the dangerous drama unleashed by this ravaged world. A stirring, bloody, dystopian soap that's worth watching.
Watch all three seasons of Into the Badlands on Netflix or AMC+.
17. The Last Man on Earth
Will Forte's comedic cringefest is about a silly, selfish loser, Phil, who, after months on his own following a world-ending pandemic, discovers there are actually other survivors out there. The problem is Phil's an awkward sociopath and the hearty laughs unspool as only Mr. Forte can provide. Like Twisted Metal a few entries back, The Last Man on Earth is a rare comedy we're including to break up the dystopian dourness. It's ambitious, audacious, and truly gut-busting. Kristen Schaal, January Jones, Mary Steenburgen, and Jason Sudeikis co-star.
Watch all four seasons of The Last Man on Earth on Hulu.
16. The 100
One of the true tenured CW long-timers, that, you know, wasn't Supernatural or part of the Arrowverse was The 100 -- a sci-fi saga, loosely based on books by Kass Morgan, about a hundred teenage delinquents sent down to the Earth's surface from an orbiting, malfunctioning Ark to see if the planet's surface is survivable following a nuclear war that wiped out everything.
Over the course of 100 episodes (it was a must!), these characters endure harsh elements, brutal war, a dastardly AI, interdimensional travel, and some surprisingly dark content. In fact, The 100, which deviates pretty substantially from the novels, may just be the grimmest show on this countdown.
Watch all seven seasons of The 100 on Netflix.
15. Jericho
In the biggest case of fan appeasement since the Firefly movie Serenity got made, CBS' Jericho was brought back for a second season, saved from cancellation by fervent fans who ran a strong SAVE JERICHO campaign. Sure, it only lasted for one more season, and plans for a follow-up movie were eventually scrapped, but Jericho still stands as one of the most famous cult series ever.
Skeet Ulrich, Lennie James (ahead of The Walking Dead), Michael Gaston, Ashley Scott, and Gerald McRaney starred in this nuclear fallout drama about the residents of the fictional city of Jericho, Kansas, isolated due to loss of power and communications. Eventually war breaks out with a neighboring community while, in the background, a new militarized government sets up shop in the Western half of the U.S.
Created by Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure), Stephen Chbosky (author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower), and Jonathan E. Steinberg (Black Sails, Percy Jackson and the Olympians), Jericho's all about maintaining one's humanity while trying to reboot society.
You can watch the two seasons of Jericho on Paramount+.
14. Westworld
You'll see Jonathan Nolan's name twice on this list but we wanted to call out a secret third Jonah Nolan show, Person of Interest. It started as a CBS procedural about a billionaire and a depressed mercenary saving people's lives based on a surveillance algorithm and it expanded brilliantly into a fully serialized series about warring AIs. It's not a "dystopian" show, per se, because it was about characters trying to prevent a dystopia, but still.
It's also a great precursor for what Nolan would do on Westworld, an AI apocalypse series that actually shows you, over the course of four seasons, how the world ends. What starts as a robotic Wild West theme park experiencing malfunction and massacre (featuring the first sparks of AI becoming "aware") spins out into some serious apocalyptic wild swings. In fact, this could have easily been the world our heroes on Person of Interest were fighting to stop.
Season 4 was not meant to be the end-end but HBO un-renewed the series after already having greenlit a Season 5. Evan Rachel Wood, Ed Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright, Aaron Paul, and James Marsden starred.
The four seasons of Westworld are not available on Max. You can purchase them on various platforms or watch Season 1 on Tubi.
13. The Walking Dead
At one point, for a couple years, The Walking Dead was the highest-rated show on TV. Sure, the zombie genre had been running very hot all through the 2000s but nothing like this had ever made it to TV. Based on the acclaimed Robert Kirkman comic series, The Walking Dead got people to watch horror who never would normally. Heck, entire families watched this together and it often featured gore that was exponentially nastier than you'd see in a movie.
The Walking Dead, pure and simple, worked and when it was one fire it was a juggernaut of action, suspense, love triangles, heartache, and nail-biting close calls. And it would place even higher on the list if AMC had just let it go when the time was right. But now, after well over a decade on the air, it still carries on with multiple spinoffs. Now, to be fair, some of the new shows have merit, but really only for die-harders. That being that, there was a time when Rick, Daryl, Carol, Michonne, Glenn, Maggie, and the rest of the zompocalypse survivors ruled the f'n roost.
Watch all 11 seasons of The Walking Dead on Netflix.
12. Squid Game
Man, dystopia loves a game show. It loves competition. Whether it's stories like Battle Royale or The Hunger Games, The Running Man, Death Race 2000 or even the fun one-off commercial in RoboCop advertising Climbing for Dollars (where to collect cash the player has to climb a rope over a pit of snarling, angry dogs). We've been condemning late-stage capitalism for years and one of the best methods is to create entertainment about people's desperate need to survive.
It's no wonder then that viewers flooded to South Korea's Squid Game in 2021, making it Netflix's most-watched series to this day. We watched as a divorced father and gambling addict joined the ranks of 455 players on a crazed, nightmarish game show where those in debt play lethal children's games for a jackpot prize. Squid Game has a sharp brutality and keen social commentary, making for compelling, addictive, and squirm-worthy TV.
Watch the two seasons of Squid Game on Netflix. The third and final season will be released on June 27, 2025.
11. Fallout
Jonathan Nolan's latest dive into dystopia is his successful adaptation of Fallout, the huge game franchise about the wasteland future world of an alternate history America. This time, however, unlike the morose machinations of Person of Interest and Westworld, Fallout sticks to the giddy gallows humor of the games, acting not so much as a retelling of one of the popular games but as a new Fallout installment that exists alongside them.
Nolan, co-creating with Lisa Joy and Bethesda Game Studios, nails the tone of the games while also canonically expanding the lore and adding to the mosaic. Yellowjackets' Ella Purnell stars as a Vault Dweller, with no above-ground life experience, exploring the outside world in search of her missing father (Kyle MacLachlan). There she encounters a Brotherhood of Steel hopeful, Maximus (Aaron Moten), and a former Hollywood cowboy (Walton Goggins) who's still alive, and disfigured, 200 years after doomsday thanks to radiation. Fallout is a darkly comic dive into an insane world of ghoulish gunslingers, mech-suited mercs, mutated beasts, and Vault Boy propaganda.
You can watch the first season of Fallout on Prime Video. Season 2 has been greenlit.
10. Black Summer
The superb sleeper on the list, Black Summer is the greatest zombie show to ever stream. Even if you've tired of the genre and are done with undead hordes terrorizing trembling survivors, we implore you to check out this sinister, inventive descent into hell. Z Nation creators Karl Schaefer and John Hyams envisioned Black Summer as a spinoff, or companion piece of sorts, but where Z Nation had a tongue-in-cheek quality, Black Summer is a vicious, scathing potboiler that doesn't let up. Fast-moving zombies are taking over the world and our main characters are just merely surviving. The entire time. It's relentless and superb.
It's also uniquely formatted, separated into segments titled with characters' names. Segments that can run from one minute to 10. And the episodes themselves can be 40 minutes or 20. Black Summer is lean and mean. It's just the world falling. You know, the s*** that happened when Rick Grimes was in a coma.
You can watch the two seasons of Black Summer on Netflix.
9. Silo
By listing Silo here, we're also giving a gentle nod to the Snowpiercer series which, after switching networks, wrapped up its fourth and final season last summer. We're comparing the two because that show and Silo give us a destroyed, desolate future -- Snowpiercer of ice, Silo of (as yet) unknown ruin -- where the last survivors of the human race are stored away inside a big metal tube that's their only chance of survival, and also because of the exploration they both tackle of class revolution. The front of the train/back of the train dynamic is now the top of the Silo/bottom of the Silo struggle.
Yes, instead of a train, Silo is... well, set in a massive subterranean silo. One that contains ten thousand people. One of whom is Juliette, a headstrong engineer from the low levels who is mysteriously named as the new "Sheriff" following the death of the previous one. Silo, based on an acclaimed book series, is a stunning show, acting as almost a star vehicle for powerhouse Rebecca Ferguson as she takes Juliette through a clever conspiracy thriller set among a population whose histories have been erased, and all past artifacts outlawed, so that they don't even know what's outside the silo or what the Before Times were like. Tim Robbins, Common, Rashida Jones, and Steve Zahn co-star.
You can watch the first two seasons of Silo on Apple TV+. Season 3 has been greenlit.
8. Severance
Sticking with Apple TV+ here, Severance is the streamer's biggest hit ever, mesmerizing fans with a quirky, upsetting dystopia where an experimental brain chip allows people to split their work self into a separate consciousness -- unleashing an avalanche of ethical dilemmas about creating life that's just imprisoned labor.
At first, the premise of Severance sounded like a Black Mirror episode stretched out (particularly aspects of the "White Christmas" special) but it quickly established it's own offbeat world, tone, and look, borrowing from Terry Gilliam, Jacques Tati, and more for a marvelous mystery series that gives a nefarious new meaning to the term "return to office." Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, Britt Lower, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken star in this devilish head-scratcher from creator Dan Erickson and EP/director Ben Stiller.
You can watch the first two seasons of Severance on Apple TV+. Season 3 has been greenlit.
7. Station Eleven
"I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die."
The lone miniseries on the list, Station Eleven, based on the book by Emily St. John Mandel, looks at the world during, and after, a pandemic kills off most of the population and reduces society to scattered, primitive clusters. We follow a girl, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler and Mackenzie Davis), as she survives the collapse of everything, growing up to join a traveling performance troupe that traverses the Great Lakes region performing Before Times plays and poems.
Leftovers writer/producer Patrick Somerville once again deals with global colony collapse, hope, love, and cults, gifting us with the most Leftovers-feeling series since The Leftovers. Station Eleven is transcendent TV, the type that touches your soul. Unfortunately, it was released during 2020 when hardly anyone wanted to watch a story where a virus wipes out all civilization, but those who saw it know how powerful and beautiful the series is.
You can watch all 10 episodes of Station Eleven on Max.
6. Black Mirror
An astute, mostly upsetting anthology series, acting as our 21st century Twilight Zone, Black Mirror is a phenomenal collection of mini-movies about imagined futures for humanity that range from uniquely augmented to downright depressing and diabolical. Focusing mostly on technology, or sometimes social media, visionary Charlie Booker's magnum opus about desperation, distraction, and unchecked advanced tech has delivered some of the most disturbing TV in the history of the medium.
Black Mirror has also given us some remarkable love stories, from the acclaimed "San Junipero" to the algorithm-busting "Hang the DJ." Of course, counter to that are the chapters that drop the floor out from under you, whether it's a world where people are forced to soulcycle for currency ("Fifteen Million Merits") or where their consciousness can be transferred in terrible ways ("Black Museum," "White Christmas," "USS Callister") or even -- to some a devastatingly timely story -- a future where every single social interaction is given a rating ("Nosedive"). Black Mirror is harrowing pulp that resonates deep within.
You can watch all seven seasons of Black Mirror on Netflix.
5. 12 Monkeys
Dismissed as a bad idea, as most TV shows based on beloved movies wind up being in the end, 12 Monkeys took the time travel ball and ran the f'n distance. Over four seasons, 12 Monkeys went from being a tweaked version of the Terry Gilliam movie (and, in turn, Chris Marker's La Jetée from 1962), with the central characters you're more or less familiar with (considering how the movie was a big showcase for Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt), and ballooned into a first-class adventure about the concept of predestination versus free will, raising the bar at every turn.
12 Monkeys begins with Aaron Stanford's Cole attempting to go back in time to stop a world-ending plague, a more basic nod to the movie, but it blossoms into full exploration of the post-apocalyptic world that Cole comes from. It's really in the later seasons that the show became its own tremendous, wonderful thing. It's a severely underrated time travel thriller that needs to be checked out. Amanda Schull, Emily Hampshire, Kirk Acevedo, and Todd Stashwick co-star.
The four seasons of 12 Monkeys are not currently streaming, but they are purchasable.
4. The Handmaid's Tale
One of the bleakest entries on this list, The Handmaid's Tale can be a difficult watch. It unapologetically lays out a cruel, oppressive, misogynistic future where a second Civil War has created a totalitarian regime that uses woman as child-bearing slaves. Margaret Atwood's pivotal 1985 novel is vividly brought to life here, haunting us with every twist and turn.
It's a heavy series, not to be binged lightly, but it's headlined by Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss and her ferocious performance as Offred, a woman who's captured and forced into a life of servitude amidst a new world of horrifying religious extremism. The Handmaid's Tale is meticulously paced, utterly suspenseful, and sometimes, honestly, too much to bear. Joseph Fiennes, Yvonne Strahovski, Ann Dowd, Alexis Bledel, and Bradley Whitford also star.
Watch all six seasons of The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu.
3. The Last of Us
The Last of Us isn't just the best video game-adapted TV series of all time, it's just a flat out brilliant watch, taking a magnificent story set up from the Naughty Dog game franchise and transferring it to television, adding bold new takes, twists, and turmoil while also keeping the core elements that worked -- namely the relationship between near-suicidal apocalypse survivor Joel and plucky, vengeful teen Ellie (who just might be the key to saving the entire world from its hostile mushroom zombielords).
Casting was paramount here, and stars Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey deftly deliver the Joel and Ellie we need for this entire zombie (but not "zombie") series to work. At its gruesome heart, The Last of Us is a story about love and loss and the family we find when we think all hope has been extinguished. The best example of this is "Long, Long Time," an episode that took two side characters from the game and extrapolated one of the greatest love stories ever put on screen.
The show is also about impossible decisions and terrible choices, the hallmarks of great dystopian horror and sci-fi. Season 2 is finally upon us and most viewers simply won't be ready for the intense drama ahead. Craig Mazin ("Chernobyl") and Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann have given us back the heart that The Walking Dead lost years ago.
Watch the first season of The Last of Us on Max. Season 2 premieres April 13, 2025.
2. The Leftovers
Not only does The Leftovers, which lasted three glorious seasons on HBO, uniquely present a world struggling with both grief and existential anxiety following a mini-Rapture type event, where 2% of the population vanished without explanation, but it also just happens to be one of the greatest TV shows of all time. Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta (loosely adapting his own novel) present a rich landscape of wondrous happenings and vivid characters, toplined by Justin Theroux's Kevin and Carrie Coon's Nora.
The Leftovers evolves from a strong-yet-forlorn first season into an exceptionally magical experience in Seasons 2 and 3, never answering why the people disappeared but instead living within that uncertainty and painting a vast mural of both trauma and joy. This is a moral imperative for TV lovers. Not your typical "dystopia," but a world gone mad nonetheless.
Watch all three seasons of The Leftovers on Max.
1. Battlestar Galactica
The work that Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica did for legitimizing genre TV cannot be overstated. Science fiction was always about showing us a mirror -- using parables, metaphors, and tucked away social commentary -- but BSG was a landmark show. It was a powerful, mature space odyssey during the most recent Golden Age of TV, able to easily compete with the Sopranos, Shields, and Wires of the era.
As for the "dystopia" aspect? Absolutely. It's just maybe not what we've come to expect over the years. It's a future hellscape... for a different, past iteration of people. A cautionary tale, if you will, as we follow the remnants of humanity fleeing through space after a mass genocide carried out by their own AI creations -- Cylons, who now look just like humans. It's an expert look at post-9/11 fear and paranoia with a stellar ensemble, including Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell, Katee Sackhoff, Tricia Helfer, and more. With massive moments and cunning twists that will make your heart both soar and sink, BSG reworked a clunky '70s sci-fi series, which had some retro cult love, and gave it grandeur and gravitas.
Watch all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica on Prime Video (through the end of April).
What's your favorite dystopian TV series? Is there one we missed that you'd have liked to see on the list? Vote in our poll and sound off below.
Connexion
