Less than two weeks after The Walking Dead finale, you may be feeling some withdrawal pangs. Unfortunately, there’s nearly three more months until the series comes back. What can you watch in the interim? Here are five other shows you may like, based on your love of The Walking Dead.
In the Flesh — If you love The Walking Dead mostly for the zombies, there’s a few other zombie options: Z Nation (which I understand is not very good), iZombie (which is cute fun), or The Returned (which is very good, but very slow). My suggestion, however, would be In the Flesh, a great British drama about zombies that have been “cured.” They still look like zombies, but their brain functions have returned and their cravings can be managed with medicine. It’s a big, giant metaphor for the immigration issue in the UK (and now, in the United States): People don’t want zombies/Muslims in their towns because they fear them, but the zombie-humans prove to be very good, honest, non-murderous people who just want to fit into society (although a very small percentage of them are into terrorizing).
The Leftovers — Personally, my favorite aspect of The Walking Dead is its themes about surviving grief and moving on in the wake of death. The Leftovers covers this terrain better than any show on TV, and the second season is also arguably the best season of television in 2015. It comes from Damon Lindelof, so there are some Lost-like quirks, but it’s a brilliant, challenging, and surprising series with some phenomenal acting and a few twists that will blow your mindhole.
Last Man on Earth — If you’re just into the apocalyptic setting of The Walking Dead, give Last Man on Earth a try. It’s an amusing spin on apocalyptic dramas that’s less about surviving, and more about dealing with the day-to-day problems of living on a planet where everyone else is dead. It can be grating and obnoxious at times, and it can be very funny at others, but it’s fun to imagine what you might do if you had access to everything on the planet. You might, as Will Forte’s character did, celebrate Christmas by blowing up a yacht.
Six Feet Under — A 2001 series may be considered an “older” show now, but its themes are just as resonant in 2015. If you’re into the deaths on The Walking Dead, every single episode of Six Feet Under begins with a death, and like The Leftovers and The Walking Dead, SFU grapples with how people deal with the grief, overcome guilt, and move on after losing loved ones. The HBO series may even put those The Walking Dead deaths into perspective for you. “Why do people die?” the series asks. “To make life important.”
Southland — If you’re into Abraham on The Walking Dead, the actor who plays him, Michael Cudlitz, was absolutely phenomenal on Southland. There are actually some thematic similarities between the shows, too. Southland is a slice-of-life show about cops dealing with the day-to-day problems associated with crime. Crime in Los Angeles is a lot like the zombies in The Walking Dead: You can’t rid the city of it. You can move it around. You can isolate it. You can occasionally protect yourself from it, but it’s an ever-present danger, and trying to eradicate it is a Sisyphean task. In other words, like the walkers, you can’t get rid of crime. It just has to be dealt with.
