In this piece · 18 sections+
If you only watch one thing on this list, watch The Last of Us on HBO Max. It's the closest thing to peak-era Walking Dead — bleak survival, bonded characters, monsters that mean something — and it pulls off in ten episodes what TWD took six seasons to do. Start there. The rest of this list is for after you've finished it and you're sitting on the couch staring into the middle distance wondering why every show now is about a billionaire's daughter solving a murder in Hawaii.
We're going to assume you've watched The Walking Dead and its various spinoffs. We're going to assume you don't need another paragraph about Rick Grimes. You searched this because you want something to watch tonight. Let's go.
Must-Watch Tier
The Last of Us (2023, 2 seasons, HBO Max)
Start with: S1E1, but the bail-early test is S1E3 — if "Long, Long Time" doesn't get you, nothing on this list will. Who'll love it: anyone who watched TWD for Rick and Carl, the Hershel's farm-era stuff, the human drama wrapped in the apocalypse. Who'll bounce: people who only watched for headshots and Negan monologues. Time: Season 1 is 9 episodes, around an hour each. A weekend. Season 2 is out and the discourse around it is its own apocalypse — your mileage may vary. Status: ongoing, season 3 in production. Pedro Pascal grunting his way through a fungus apocalypse should not work this well. The infected are basically zombies with better PR — they run, they shriek, they have a whole cordyceps mushroom situation going on — but the show is really about a middle-aged man and a teenage girl walking across a dead country and slowly destroying each other emotionally. It's TWD if TWD had been written by people who like writing.
🏆 DROP EVERYTHING
Station Eleven (2021, 1 season, HBO Max)
Start with: S1E1, and if you're not in by E3 it's not for you. Who'll love it: people who liked the quiet TWD episodes. The ones at the prison before everything went to hell. Who'll bounce: anyone who needs a body count per episode. There's almost no violence. Time: 10 episodes, 50 min. A long weekend. Status: ended, complete, miniseries. A flu wipes out 99% of humanity and twenty years later a traveling Shakespeare troupe wanders the Great Lakes performing Hamlet for survivor villages. I know how that sounds. Trust me. It is the most beautiful, devastating post-apocalyptic show ever made and almost nobody watched it because HBO Max was busy being renamed for the third time. It's based on the Emily St. John Mandel novel, which is also great, and which actually predicted a pandemic in 2014 — so maybe stop reading prophetic novels, people. Watch this one. It will fix something in you.
🏆 DROP EVERYTHING
The Leftovers (2014, 3 seasons, HBO Max)
Start with: S1E1, but the real bail test is S1E3. If you make it to season 2, you're in for life. Who'll love it: anyone who liked the existential weight of TWD — the grief, the "why are we still doing this" of it all. Who'll bounce: people who need answers. The show does not explain what happened. Ever. That's the point. Time: 28 episodes, 60 min. A real commitment. Two weekends, minimum. Status: ended, complete, three perfect seasons. Damon Lindelof made this after Lost and decided this time he wouldn't pretend to have a finale. 2% of the world's population vanishes one day, no explanation given, and the show is about everyone left behind losing their minds in slightly different ways. It is the saddest show ever put on television. Justin Theroux runs a lot. Carrie Coon should have won every award. It is, on a molecular level, what TWD was reaching for in its best moments and never quite grabbed.
✅ WORTH IT
Chernobyl (2019, 1 season, HBO Max)
Start with: S1E1, all in. Who'll love it: anyone who liked the early TWD CDC episode, or the dread of a world poisoned by something invisible. Who'll bounce: if you want zombies, this isn't that. The monster is radiation and Soviet bureaucracy. Time: 5 episodes, 60 min each. One night if you don't sleep, two if you're a grown-up. Status: ended, miniseries, complete. Real-life apocalypse mini-series about the 1986 nuclear disaster. The reason it belongs on this list: that same TWD feeling of watching ordinary people figure out, in real time, that the world has ended and nobody's coming to save them. Jared Harris carries the whole thing on his face. There's a scene with three guys volunteering to drain a radioactive pool that is the single most TWD-coded moment ever filmed in something that isn't TWD.
✅ WORTH IT
Worth Your Time Tier
Black Summer (2019, 2 seasons, Netflix)
Start with: S1E1, you'll know in 20 minutes. Who'll love it: people who think TWD got too soft, too talky, too "let's have a fireside argument about morality." Who'll bounce: anyone looking for character depth. There barely is any. Time: 16 episodes, around 30 min each. Two nights. Status: technically ongoing but Netflix hasn't ordered a third in years, so consider it functionally cancelled. A Z Nation spinoff that turned out way better than it had any right to be. The zombies sprint. Episodes are basically silent action set pieces. There's an opening sequence in season one that's a single tracking shot of pure, panicking chaos and it'll remind you why you started watching zombie shows in the first place. It's lean, mean, and short. Treat it like an espresso shot of dread.
✅ WORTH IT
Sweet Tooth (2021, 3 seasons, Netflix)
Start with: S1E1. Bail test is the end of E2. Who'll love it: people who liked Clementine in the Walking Dead games, or anyone who wanted TWD to be about kids surviving the world rather than adults arguing about kids. Who'll bounce: if you need grit and gore, this is softer. There's a kid with antlers. Time: 24 episodes, around 45 min. A real chunk. Status: ended, complete, three seasons, full arc. Post-pandemic world where kids are being born as human-animal hybrids. Sounds insane. It works. It's the most genuinely hopeful post-apocalyptic show on this list, which after seven seasons of Negan beating people with a bat might be exactly what your nervous system needs.
✅ WORTH IT
The Terror (2018, 2 seasons, AMC+ / Hulu)
Start with: Season 1, episode 1. The two seasons are completely separate stories — Season 1 is the one. Who'll love it: people who watched TWD for the slow dread of "these people are not going to make it." Who'll bounce: if you need fast pacing, no. This show takes its time the way an iceberg takes its time. Time: Season 1 is 10 episodes, 60 min. A weekend. Status: anthology, season 1 ended, season 2 ended, no season 3 ordered. British sailors in the 1840s get trapped in arctic ice trying to find the Northwest Passage and something out there is hunting them. It is TWD's "we are isolated and being picked off one by one" energy turned up to opera. Jared Harris again, because Jared Harris is the patron saint of men slowly realizing they're cooked.
✅ WORTH IT
Snowpiercer the movie, not the show (2013, 1 film, Prime Video)
Start with: just press play. Who'll love it: anyone who wanted TWD's class-warfare-in-the-apocalypse stuff (the Alexandria vs. the Saviors arc) but actually executed by a great director. Who'll bounce: if you can't read subtitles for some of the early scenes, you might miss things. Time: one movie, 2 hours and 6 minutes. Tonight. Status: standalone film. Bong Joon-ho before he was BONG JOON-HO. The TV show is fine. The movie is great. It's the last of humanity stuck on a perpetual-motion train circling a frozen Earth, and the poor people in the back decide they've had enough. Watch Snowpiercer on Prime and skip the show unless you really need more.
✅ WORTH IT
Only For Fans Tier
Z Nation (2014, 5 seasons, Netflix / various)
Start with: S1E1, but honestly skip to season 2 if the first three episodes feel rough. Who'll love it: people who think TWD takes itself way too seriously and want to watch a show where someone kills a zombie with a giant cheese wheel. Who'll bounce: anyone who wants emotional weight. There is none. That's the feature. Time: 68 episodes, 42 min. A long road. Status: ended, cancelled after season 5 with some plot threads loose. The Asylum-produced (yes, the Sharknado people) zombie show that ran alongside TWD for years and was secretly more fun. It's dumb. It knows it's dumb. It commits to the dumb. Sometimes after a hard week you don't want Pedro Pascal looking sad in the dark. You want a Murphy and a zombie bear. This is for that night.
🛋️ BACKGROUND TV
See (2019, 3 seasons, Apple TV+)
Start with: S1E1. If you're not on board by E3, you're never going to be. Who'll love it: people who liked TWD's "new society built on weird rules" stuff — the Whisperers, the Commonwealth. Who'll bounce: if you can't get past Jason Momoa shouting at things, this isn't your show. Time: 24 episodes, around 50 min. A solid commitment. Status: ended, complete, three full seasons. Centuries after a virus wiped out most of humanity and left the survivors blind, Jason Momoa plays a tribal warrior whose kids are born with the ability to see. The premise sounds like a Mad Libs of an Apple TV+ pitch meeting and yet — it works. Big, weird, sincere, gory. Apple spent a fortune on this show and almost nobody watched because Apple TV+ is where shows go to be excellent and unwatched.
🛋️ BACKGROUND TV
Generation Kill (2008, 1 season, HBO Max)
Start with: E1. Who'll love it: people who watched TWD for the squad dynamic, the long marches, the gallows humor between guys who know they might die. Who'll bounce: there are no zombies. There is no apocalypse. It's the Iraq invasion. Time: 7 episodes, 60-75 min. A weekend. Status: ended, miniseries, complete. From the David Simon school. It's a war show but it lives in the exact same emotional register as TWD's best stretches — small group of people moving through a dangerous landscape, dark jokes, terrible leadership, a slow grinding sense that something is very wrong. If you loved Daryl and Abraham riffing in a truck, this is two seasons of that, except real. One of the most underrated shows HBO ever made.
✅ WORTH IT
Skip Tier (don't waste your night)
- Fear the Walking Dead — started okay, became unwatchable. AMC trying to milk a cow that has been dead for years. 🐍 SLOP
- The Walking Dead: World Beyond — even the people who made this don't defend it. ☠️ WAR CRIME
- The 100 — fans love it, but the first two seasons play like a CW high school drama and most TWD viewers will throw their phone across the room. 🐍 SLOP
- Y: The Last Man — cancelled after one season on a cliffhanger. Don't start a show that's been euthanized mid-sentence. 🐍 SLOP
FAQ
What's the closest show to The Walking Dead?
Tone-for-tone, The Last of Us. It has the same DNA — survival, found family, monsters as metaphor, prestige bleakness. Black Summer is closer if you specifically miss the running, the gore, and the relentless pacing of the first three TWD seasons before it became a soap opera in a junkyard.
Are there any zombie shows actually better than The Walking Dead?
Yes. The Last of Us, on basically every metric — writing, pacing, performance, finale that doesn't make you want to throw your remote into a lake. Black Summer is also better at the actual zombie part. TWD had the best ensemble for a stretch in the middle and nothing on this list quite matches that, but most of these shows know how to end, which TWD famously did not.
Where can I watch all the Walking Dead spinoffs?
AMC+ has all of them — Daryl Dixon, Dead City, The Ones Who Live, the original, all the rest. They're also on Netflix and other streamers in pieces depending on the month and the latest licensing argument. If you want the full library, AMC+ is the move. If you want one or two, search and follow whatever streamer comes up that week — the rights move around like a fugitive.
What should I watch if I want post-apocalyptic but not zombies?
Station Eleven is the answer. It is also, separately, the answer to most questions about life. The Leftovers if you want existential post-apocalypse without literal apocalypse. Chernobyl if you want real-world dread. None of them have zombies. All of them have the feeling.
What to watch tonight
If you've never seen it: start The Last of Us Season 1, Episode 1 on HBO Max. By Sunday you'll have finished season one and you'll know whether you want to keep going.
If you've already seen The Last of Us and you're sitting there at 9pm with a bowl of cereal trying to figure out what to do with your life: start Station Eleven, Episode 1, HBO Max. Give it three episodes. It will reorganize your interior.
If you want to turn your brain off and watch zombies eat people in Saskatchewan: Black Summer, Episode 1, Netflix. It's 30 minutes. You'll know.
That's the list. Go watch something. The world's ending anyway — might as well rehearse.
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