TV Shows Like The Last of Us
If you like The Last of Us, here are 12 similar TV shows — each with its current AI renewal verdict, so you can see which are still going and which have been cancelled.
HBO · Drama · The Last of Us is likely renewed
The Last of Us works because it never lets the apocalypse become wallpaper. The fungal infection, the quarantine zones, the roving factions of desperate people, all of it exists to put pressure on the relationship between Joel and Ellie. That relationship, prickly and earned and eventually devastating, is the actual show. Fans respond to how HBO commits to the slow build, the quiet moments between the violence, and the refusal to make survival feel heroic in any clean way. It is brutal and it is sad, and that combination is exactly what keeps people watching.
The best shows like The Last of Us
1. Fear the Walking Dead
If you ever wondered what it looks like the moment society starts to crack, Fear the Walking Dead is structured around exactly that question. Set during the early days of the outbreak in Los Angeles, it puts ordinary people inside the chaos rather than years after it. The focus on watching normal life dissolve in real time gives it a dread that fans of The Last of Us, who know how much weight a world before the apocalypse can carry, will recognize.
Stream on Netflix, AMC Plus Apple TV Channel , AMC+ Amazon Channel, AMC+ Roku Premium Channel
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2. Fallout
Like The Last of Us, Fallout is a prestige adaptation of a beloved video game series set in a post-apocalyptic America, and it takes the source material seriously while finding its own voice. It is darker in a more satirical way, poking hard at corporate power and human greed as the real engines of destruction. Viewers who appreciated how The Last of Us used its ruined world to say something about people will find Fallout doing something similar, just with more irradiated mutants and dark comedy alongside the bleakness.
Stream on Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Likely Renewed97%
3. The Last Ship
The Last Ship centers on a naval crew that becomes one of the last organized forces on Earth after a pandemic kills most of the population, and its core drive, find the cure, stop the dying, is urgent in the same way The Last of Us is. The show leans more into action and military procedure than character drama, so it is a different kind of intensity, but the stakes feel real and the world feels genuinely depleted. Fans who responded to the epidemic and survival elements of The Last of Us will find a lot to chew on here.
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4. Z Nation
Z Nation's basic premise, a ragtag group crossing a zombie-ravaged United States to deliver the one person who might save humanity, maps closely onto the road-trip structure of The Last of Us. It is scrappier and more willing to be pulpy than HBO's show, but the cross-country journey format and the bond that forms among people in impossible circumstances should feel familiar. Fans who liked watching Joel and Ellie navigate a broken America will find the same rhythm here, with a rougher, more genre-forward energy.
Stream on fuboTV, Peacock Premium, AMC Plus Apple TV Channel , AMC+ Amazon Channel
Cancelled0%
5. 12 Monkeys
12 Monkeys is built around a plague that ends the world and one man's mission to stop it before it starts, which puts it in direct conversation with the epidemic themes of The Last of Us. The show layers time travel and mythology on top of that premise and gets genuinely complex across its run, rewarding viewers who want more than just survival mechanics. Fans who connected with the idea of sacrificing everything to protect another person, or to protect humanity itself, will find that tension running through almost every episode here.
Stream on Amazon Prime Video, MyOutdoorTV, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Ended0%
More on shows like The Last of Us
Fans of the show tend to look for a few specific things in whatever they watch next. They want a world that feels genuinely broken, not just a backdrop for action set pieces. They want characters who are changed by what they go through, not just characters who survive. And they tend to have a high tolerance for darkness, as long as it is attached to something human. The shows below share at least some of those qualities, though they come at them from different angles.
Fear the Walking Dead and Z Nation are the most straightforward genre companions here. Both involve small groups moving through a collapsed world and depending on each other to stay alive. Z Nation's setup is essentially a road-trip version of The Last of Us, a dangerous cross-country journey carrying one person who might save humanity. Fear the Walking Dead takes the interesting approach of showing the collapse itself rather than the aftermath. Fallout, adapted from the video game series, is tonally different, leaning into dark comedy and retrofuturist weirdness, but it shares the DNA of a game-to-screen adaptation and does a serious amount of world-building around what civilizations do to themselves when resources run out. The Last Ship narrows its focus to a single crew racing to stop a pandemic, which gives it a more procedural energy, but the core urgency is the same. 12 Monkeys is the most plot-driven of the group, a time-travel story that is ultimately about stopping a plague before it happens, and it rewards viewers who like their apocalypse fiction tangled and mythologically ambitious.
None of these shows are identical to The Last of Us, and a couple of them are considerably lighter in tone. But each one takes seriously the question of what people are willing to do and who they are willing to become when the world stops working.
More shows like The Last of Us
Frequently asked
- What is the most popular show like The Last of Us?
- Fear the Walking Dead is the most popular show similar to The Last of Us in the IsItRenewed catalogue.
- Are shows like The Last of Us still on the air?
- Of the 12 shows similar to The Last of Us listed here, 0 currently carry a renewed verdict — the rest are cancelled, ended, or awaiting a decision.
- How does IsItRenewed pick shows like The Last of Us?
- The recommendations come from TMDB's similar-titles data, and each is shown with its current AI renewal verdict so you know which are still going.