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TV shows or movies like 1883 or The Last of Us?
I've just finished 1883. I haven't shed so many tears over a stupid show in a long time, if ever, and I want more of it. It was similar when I watched several lets-plays of The Last of Us.
I'm not sure I can pin down what I'm looking for. I think it's the journey through hostile territory and thriving in it. There's mostly suffering and hardship, and every small moment of joy is only followed by more bad times. But for the protagonist this is food, it only makes them grow and become more fierce. Not necessarily to their advantage, but that's drama I guess.
Any suggestions are appreciated!
Station Eleven fits the bill I think. It's a story filled with much beauty and much pain, and some really good performances from the lead actors.
I'll second this suggestion. Especially if you enjoyed the post apocalyptic setting of The Last of Us.
Came here to say Station Eleven! The book is well worth your time as well.
I thought station 11 had great world building and maybe 3 or 4 standout episodes (those with the indian fella in them) but generally I perceived it to have major pacing issues.
The Leftovers might fit the bill here. It's very highly regarded, it explores a lot about humans dealing with the pain and trying to find a way to keep living after a tragic supernatural event.
The Leftovers is a show that really made an impression on me. I think of it pretty regularly still.
I don't know how to describe it in much detail without spoiling it. I probably won't ever watch it again due to it's emotional weight. But yeah, I'll never forget it. Definitely a good watch.
I remember considering it but decided against it because I was afraid it would feel like a waste of time like Lost.
I haven't seen Lost aside from the first couple episodes at most and for whatever reason those episodes turned me off from it completely, so I can't say how it compares to Lost. I'd be curious to know what about Lost made it feel like a waste of time just to understand if elements of that are something that you might feel that way about The Leftovers.
Trying not to say too much, but I will say that The Leftovers does use a fair bit of mystery, like there's just a lot of mysterious events that sometimes are explained but sometimes they're not, and the point isn't that you get an answer for those mysteries, the point is to be along for the ride with the characters as they're going through them, as they also don't know what is going on. Just as I mentioned the premise of the show begins with a supernatural event, the point of the show isn't to just have supernatural crazy events necessarily, it's mostly just the setting for the stage that the characters play on.
That description there is partly what brought The Leftovers to mind for me, because it fits it pretty well. The show is an emotional roller coaster of sorts, or as you said in another comment, "emotion porn" is in a way I think a befitting description for The Leftovers. I still remember my first watch I kind of felt a bit of a mindfuck from it, but it always felt rewarding for me to keep watching, and there are a lot of scenes that pack emotional punches. It's a very heavy show in that regard I'd say. I also thought the ending was fairly satisfying (though careful for spoilers if you go looking for info on the show), and one thing that HBO does better than typical network TV does generally speaking is letting a story be told to it's natural conclusion rather than forcing the story to be drawn out in order to keep it on air and get more money that way. I have a very low opinion of most network television dramas, there is more of an obvious and not as interesting to me formula to them that I think is what I spotted in the first episode or so of Lost that turned me off on it. (Especially true of older ones before TV series format grew to what it has in the past decade or so.)
I didn't like Lost because it had too much artificial drama: Situations that would never happen unless the only goal is a maximized emotional response from an audience. I'm fine with unanswered mysteries, but I don't understand why the characters themselves aren't even looking for an explanation. Every episode was asking more questions and no question was ever really answered. It's drama that is set in a vacuum. No rules of the real world or an imaginary world stand in the way of drama. Drama is god and it will do anything at any time for no reason at all.
Spoilers
If you find a luxurious bunker in the middle of the jungle on a deserted island, one of your first questions to its inhabitants would be something like "how did you get here?", "where does all this stuff come from?" and "what are you doing here?", etc, but the Lost characters don't care about any of that and because there much more room for drama in the issue of distributing the newly found delicious food, showers, etc among the survivors of the plane crash.But I agree that HBO is better in this regard. I missed that The Leftovers was from them. I should probably check it out.
My recollection of The Leftovers leads me to believe that you wouldn't come away with the same perception of it as you did Lost. I certainly didn't, and I generally do not like shows as you described (which is probably why I couldn't watch more than an episode or two of Lost). That's why I just generally don't like TV shows that were on broadcast networks especially back in the day, because many of them have that same hook to them and just not interesting for me.
Not only is HBO a big difference between the shows, but The Leftovers was based on a novel by Tom Perrotta so it had source material to work with. The first season covers what was in the novel so the next two seasons are original but Tom was a big part in developing the show throughout. So I think that gives the show more of a solid foundation to build on from a storytelling perspective.
OK, it's on my list. Thank you for taking the time to convince me.
I dont remember if I quite made it though the first season. But I was going to say the exact opposite. That it took the main problems of Lost to the extreme. There's this insane world changing mystery and its basically ignored. It just felt like every one was dealing with it the way you would if someone died in a normal accident. I don't recall any real discussion on how such a thing could happen or any exploration of possible causes or theories. They took the single most interesting part of the show and buried it for hour after hour of people moping around.
Spoiler alert as I don't think there's a way to adequately make a response to that without having some spoilers. Trying to keep spoilers light to what someone who has partially watched the first season would know.
The Guilty Remnant is one example of how that event is not treated like any normal event. The Guilty Remnant play a huge part in the show and I think they make a pretty early appearance in the first season so I would imagine you saw them in your watch through. The whole show, every season, always comes back to that event. Everything that happens in the show comes back to the event. At least for the prominent characters in the show. Maybe you're looking at it from the background cast or just the world around those characters, but I don't think that's a fair way to assess how the world treats it just like it's not necessarily accurate to get an idea of someone's life just by looking at their Instagram page or their Facebook feed. People can be very selective about what they show if you only get small glimpses of them.What I will say is there may be some inconsistency with how the show portrays the magnitude of the event (in my opinion), but not in a way that you described it. I think early on the premise is established that 2% of the population disappeared. 2% allows for the possibility that many people aren't majorly impacted, like no one super close to them disappeared, but likely there is someone they knew that did. But the show I think does focus more on the ones who lost someone close, so you end up seeing something that portrays something much greater than 2% in my opinion. That might give some confusion to the viewer as to how we should understand the scale of the impact on the world, though I don't know that I'd see it aligning with the perspective you got from it.
I don't mean to disrespect your viewpoint at all, but I think the show has a lot of focus on people questioning the mystery of the event, and the 2nd and 3rd seasons go even further into that. I don't know if you would expect the world to burn to the ground if something like that actually happened, but I'd expect that people would cope and adapt. There's nothing that can be done to undo it, there's no immediate obvious answers within reach of the vast majority of the population, so they have no choice but to try to live their lives. However the show does often incorporate pieces that go back to questioning the mystery, with specific government departments that were created just to address that event and trying to determine the cause of it. (The Department of Sudden Departures) There's also other people, not necessarily just fringe cult lunatics (though there are plenty of those) but researchers shown trying to find answers through technological measures. All the way to the series finale the show is constantly pushing to exploring the possible causes or trying to determine what happened.
The sort of a "true" premise at the every end of the show could be an explanation of these unrealistic situations but you'd have to agree for some very stretchy gymnastics.
I remember people being fascinated by this show back then and of course seriously disappointed how it ended. But during its tenure, I remember people were wonder if Lost is somehow connected to... Half-Life. The show was kinda binge interesting and engaging but I'm not so eager to watch it again.
As for your original question: I'd suggest Battlestar Galactica (the 2004 one) which somehow meets your criteria but with that one caveat it's of scifi genre intertwined with militaristic stuff
You should definitely reconsider it. It is a very compelling and occasionally surreal human drama, where the mystery is used as context for the story and its characters, not as a goal in itself.
It's short, beautiful, has a great payoff, and a couple of the best & most memorable episodes I have ever seen in any series.
The Road and Children of Men probably fit that description. Both movies.
I really didn't enjoy the Children of Men movie compared to the book. I don't generally feel this way, I find it genuinely interesting what the movie folks decide to leave in or take out to make a shorter story. This is one of the few cases that I feel went wrong. I did really like the book.
I haven’t read the book, but I know you’re not alone in that opinion.
The Revenant for the western aspect of this post.
Have you seen The Wire?
Thematically I'm not sure it fits. But it will make you laugh, cry, and sit on the edge of your sit in a similar way.
I'm really not sure why it came to mind immediately, but it did. And I would call it one of the very few shows that qualifies as a masterpiece.
Who hasn't seen The Wire? :)
I've seen it several times because it's so good, and anyone who suggests it for any reason gets my approval, but I don't see how that fits my description. I would categorize 1883 and The Last of Us as "emotion porn" while I remember The Wire as mostly political.
Yeah, like I said, maybe a not a great fit but for me it packed a lot of humor and emotion into one show which is the same reason I enjoyed TLOU and other similar dramas.
I don't see the thread that connects The Last of Us to The Wire. They were both excellent shows, with the edge going to The Wire since it has a full five seasons compared to the TLOU's superb one.
If you're a fan of The Wire though, I'd highly suggest watching The Shield, which would have been considered the greatest cop-drama of the 00's if it didn't air simultaneously with The Wire. The final few episodes of The Shield are some of the greatest TV ever aired, particularly the scene with Vic and Claudette squaring off for the last time in the interrogation room.
The end of the fucking world.
Is not actually post-apocalyptic, it is darkly funny, but there are some strong emotional beats.
The images I remember of the final episode are strong.
Two series and done.
Seen that one. Didn't bring me to tears, but I enjoyed it. It's similar to Wayne which I liked a bit more I think.
You would likely enjoy The Son, it's an absolutely fantastic show with a new take on westerns I hadnt seen before. It has a few seasons and just came out a few years ago, stars Pierce Brosnan and was on AMC.
Edit: Godless (Netflix) is a great miniseries as well with a new take on westerns that I loved as well.
It's definitely not the same kind of setting as The Last Of Us, but I think Upright is right up your street, judging by the criteria you've set. The journey is not necessarily through hostile territory (although the Australian outback is pretty hostile), but there is lots of hardship and growth as a result of it. You have a similar grown man with unrelated teenage girl dynamic to TLOU, and to cap it off, the show is 100% "emotion porn". I've seen it four times by now and it never fails to make me bawl my eyes out.
I recently saw a western called Hostiles that remembered me of 1883. It's a harsh story, and it definitely fits the theme of "persevering in hostile territory, surrounded by suffering and hardship" that you're looking for.
And another one I only remember vaguely, if I remember correctly with similar themes: The Way Back.
If you can find it, then the series Raised by Wolves is absolutely up your alley.
I say "if you can find it" because it was one of the series that was axed by HBOMAX and difficult to find on any streaming service now. It is a vast injustice to that show.
It's kind of rare, to find survival-focused storytelling. To be fair, it is due to how it's easier to find story in human drama (interactions) than it is with basic survival.
Battlestar Galactica for example. They open with some immense human drama (*33), but then brought in a nice healthy layer of survival. The fleet began dealing with where they'd get supplies, and how. The drama came directly from that. They needed water, for example, but wanted to use prison labor since getting the water (ice mining) would be dangerous and difficult, and that jump started the conversation about the morality of what to do with the prisoners. Especially since, you know, the world had ended and all.
But then BSG shifted into pure drama, with an increasing amount of fantasy. Which becomes a different discussion, but the point here is they dropped all the survival aspects of the story. It just became kind of an assumption that Galactica and its fleet had water, had food, had ammo, etc.
Zombie stories, apocalypse stories, usually do the same thing. They'll lean on a "we have to get to safety" angle early on. Safety will not just be somewhere they're not being chewed on, but also a place that has food and water and all that.
But then they shift, and the focus becomes "can we trust him" or "she's leading those assholes to overthrow us" or whatever. And, especially with a story that goes on over a longer time period, the story stops worrying about the stuff they were so concerned with early on. It just becomes assumed that food and water (and ammo, power, etc) are available, since the story's focusing on drama now.
One of my shelved ideas is around notions of how apocalypse and disaster stories usually get told in an opposite manner from each other. Disaster is usually a natural disaster, or an asteroid crashing in, something like that. And they're usually, especially at the Hollywood level, told top-down. We're placed alongside Presidents and mayors and big important leaders who know the big picture, who make the big calls, and all that.
Apocalypse stories though, those are usually told bottom-up. We're put alongside a scared housewife (or charged up survivalist) who runs around screaming "what is happening?" as they duck and dodge and depart. We never know the big picture, never see it, and are always left wondering.
Just once, I want top-down zombie story. I want scenes where the President is interrupted, and upon being brought into the briefing room, is told "zombies are eating people." How do you deal with that? It would be interesting to see the same sorts of sequences and procedures that we run through for an asteroid or a plague or a war come into it with zombies.
"Are you serious, zombies?" the President might ask, and after the back-and-forth that amounts to "yes, totally", you get to what do you do? Send in the troops ... oh, shit, they all got eaten. How many zombies did they take with them ... oh, not enough. What now?
We bomb a city ... oh we started a fire. And it's engulfed half the state. Um .... nukes? No, we can't do that. Wait, the zombies just finished eating New York? Nukes yet? No, fuck, fine. Um .... blow up the bridges. Shit, zombies float. Now they're eating Jersey. Well, okay, it's just Jersey, but beyond that is Pennsylvania and Ohio ... we need to close the buffet before it gets that far.
I just think it would be a nice newish sort of take on a zombie apocalypse story, to follow around top-down instead of a handful of clueless survivors stuck in the thick of it. Cloverfield told a disaster story (alien invasion disaster) bottom-up, and that was refreshing since those are usually top-down and you know everything. In Cloverfield, you knew jack shit and it was great, opened a lot of fun story up.
As for stories that focus on survival, The Martian is probably the single best example of this. Nearly every major story point comes from "you're stuck on Mars, and will die if you don't work the problem." The Mountain Between Us is about half of a survival story, but the other half is a relationship story about how the experience knits two people together due to it. Cast Away is about half of a survival story, but it definitely shades more to psychology than survival.
In my experience, most popular apocalypse movies cover both sides, top-down and bottom-up. There's usually some regular Joe Nobody, sometimes a low-ranking (wannabe) scientist, who is the only one who sees the real threat and has to join up with some other nobodys for the fight for survival while the president and his cronies laugh them off until it's too late.
I really like your "top-down Zombie apocalypse" idea. I think World War Z did this, but we need more of that. There's still some suspension of disbelief because I think zombies, even the running kind, wouldn't be much of a threat to an organised army. But that's an issue with most zombie apocalypse stories and they are still enjoyable.
I generally would like to see more classic stories from a different perspective. For a long time I've had this idea of a classic action movie with lots of gun fights and car chases and general destruction, and part two would cover the legal battles over all the mayhem where our hero and his nemesis would sit in court and face the innocent bystanders whose lives were seriously impacted. It would probably have to dance on a very thin line between serious court movie and comedy to work.
I haven't seen The Mountain Between Us. Sounds interesting. Thanks!
If you've never read it check out World War Z (book not movie). It had a lot of regular Joe stuff, but there's quite a bit on overall government response to zombies.
Although I don't really want to recommend shows from Russia these days, To the Lake is pretty similar and fairly good. It's about an initial outbreak of an infectious disease and the chaos that ensues thereafter. It was made by Netflix, and has great production value and a pretty good plot.
I almost hate to bring it up because of how the final season went down, but, Game of Thrones. There's more than enough tragedy to go around, and some of the characters get to survive and grit their teeth and power through.
I mean ... my opinion is The Last of Us season 1 is the best season of a show of the last ten years.
I feel like your missing word could push this comment hard in two directions and needs an update. :)
wow. my bad, my apologies. is fixed. (But also shame on me for not giving more details...)
I think it will be very hard for OP to find any show that compares to The Last of Us, since it was such a top of the line season. The Last of Us really stands out head and shoulders over anything I can remember seeing in a long time. I would not get my hopes up for anything else to be as good.