Salva Mubarak Senior Features Writer

Widely lauded as one of the best Playstation Games of all time, The Last Of Us has now been adapted into a live-action TV series by HBO. Set 20 years after a viral outbreak destroyed human civilization and brought forth a zombie apocalypse, a hardened smuggler is tasked with safely escorting a teenager, who might be the key to saving the world, across the country.

The series, which stars Pedro Pascal, Bella Ramsey, and Gabriel Luna, was released on 15 January, 2023, and promptly became everything anyone could talk about on the Internet. Critics have even called it one of the best live-action adaptations of a video game.

While we wait for the show to become available to be streamed in India, here are a few similar shows you can stream till then…

Snowpiercer

The French graphic novel that inspired Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 movie, starring Chris Evans and Song Kang-ho, was also adapted into a TV series by Netflix. The show, like the movie, is set in a frozen wasteland where humanity’s only chance of survival is to remain onboard a perpetually moving train that travels the globe. The show followed themes of class warfare, social hierarchies, and oppression.

Watch it here

The Rain

This Danish TV show is a post-apocalyptic drama where a rain-carried virus wipes out most of humanity, forcing two siblings to hide in a bunker as they wait for their parents to return. The two emerge years later to look for their father and join a group of survivors on their journey to safety. Like The Last of Us, this drama makes a teenager the key to humanity’s survival and features a group of survivors who couldn’t be more different from each other.

Watch it here

The 100

It’s no surprise that another post-apocalyptic drama has made it to the list. In The 100, humans have escaped a nuclear war-ravaged Earth and now live in a giant space station called The Ark. Nearly a century after the exodus, The Ark is slowly shutting down and humans have to come up with another solution for survival. They decided to send 100 juvenile delinquents back to Earth to test if it is viable for the return of the rest of humanity. What could go wrong with that, right? Turns out, everything.

Watch it here

Z Nation

Another show with a similar premise of guarding humanity’s last chance of survival in a ravaged landscape, Z-Nation is a dark comedy that is set years after a zombie apocalypse. A group of people decide to transport a survivor to the last working virology lab in the country to come up with a vaccine to fight the virus.

Watch it here

Sweet Tooth

A departure from the dark and bleak themes of the other shows mentioned in the list, this one is based on a comic book of the same name by Jeff Lemire. By now you should be familiar with the theme of most of humanity being wiped out by a mysterious virus, something which Sweet Tooth shares with the others. In the show, the virus also causes the emergence of hybrid babies that are born part human and part animal. The oddities lead humans to fear and hunt them for sport, something that spells trouble for nine-year-old deer hybrid Gus, who decided to make a cross-country journey to look for his mother.

Watch it here