I would love to watch a post-apoc show that shows slowly, and in agonizing detail, how most of the population of the earth is wiped out, and how it affects all of the characters (some of whom don’t make it themselves). Then, we move on, slowly and in agonizing detail, to how the survivors live in the world without the rest of the society they lived in. This is what fascinates me - how do people react when they realize that civilization as we know it is coming to an end? When they realize that they or all of their loved ones are going to die. When they lose everyone. When everyone who’s still alive has lost everyone. How do they cope? What do they do? How do they live afterwards? I want an examination of all of this, in gritty detail.
I see taking the complete first season for the die-off - no montage of newspaper headlines, and shots of empty streets and train stations.
After a nuclear war, the elves, faeries, dwarves, and other creatures of legend come out of hiding, living in the good lands that are left, while the mutants and miscreants - what survived of the human race that caused the whole thing - live in the bad lands.
It’s a great movie; my only regret is that I don’t own a copy.
There already was a movie version of Ellison’s Vic and Blood: a Boy and His Dog, but I’ve never seen it. The short stories were great, and I have the graphic novel that Richard Corben drew to illustrate the stories, but Ellison promised a whole lot more set in Vic’s world and never delivered!
I second and [with my other hand] third this. An end of the world being shown in all its glory would be amazing; one problem in terms of TV would be that if the apocalypse were done well in Season 1, the aftermath might never be able to reach as high a climax. The End of the World is a pretty tough act to follow!
There was a post nuclear novel called Swan Song that I kind of liked.
More ‘constant threat of the possibilty of apocolypse’ than actual apocolypse, but I kind of dig Three Moons Over Milford. The War of the Worlds series turned sort of PA in it’s second season and it was done interestingly.
I would enjoy seeing post-apoc sitcoms, maybe something set in the the Mad Max or Omega Man universes. Something like Arrested Development-Ape City! (PLOA). Three’s Company but with ToeCutter or the Great Humungus instead of Jack Tripper, oh the hillarity! Or Seinfeld at Thunderdome! “So what’s with all the shoulderpads?”
Damn, I loved those books! I got hooked on them as a young boy when they were serialized in comic form in Boys’ Life magazine.
What I’d really like to see is all the strips from Boys’ Life collected as a trade paperpack. I eventually read all three books, so I know how the story ends…
[spoiler]The boys that are the heroes of the story discover that the Masters can not breath Earth’s air, and so must rely on mechanical means to live outside their giant domed cities.
In The Pool of Fire, they join with other resistance fighters around the world in staging an attack on the Masters’ cities. They use hot air balloons to reach the top of the domes, then plant grenades on them to make the domes collapse and let outside air in, thus killing the aliens.[/spoiler]
… but I wasn’t in Cub Scouts/Boy Scouts long enough for me to see if all three were serialized.
Not quite post-Apoc, but I’d like to see an anthology series based on Douglas Adams original idea that led to the HHGTTG. It was to be called The Ends of the Earth, each week, the Earth would be destroyed in a different manner. Heck, you could even do it with recurring characters, now that I think about it. You could have a couple of guys with a time machine who realize that the Earth’s going to end in a few moments, so they go back in time (say a week or a day or so) in order to prevent the disaster, only to discover that by stopping the disaster, it allows for another disaster to come along and wipe humanity out, so they have to go back in time to prevent that from happening.
Whitley Striber and James Kunetka wrote two pretty good, near-apocalyptic novels that would lend themselves well to being made into movies. Warday is about the aftermath of a limited nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviet Union in the late 1980s, with the U.S. being reduced to near-irrelevance and the object of pity and handouts by an ascendant Western Europe. Nature’s End is about a looming environmental collapse in the not-so-distant future, and the world’s high-tech but increasingly futile efforts to stave it off. When a messianic figure emerges advocating mass suicide, things get really ugly…
Also, William Brinkley’s The Last Ship is about the hopes, stresses and courage of a U.S. Navy destroyer captain and his crew after they actually participate in WWIII in late 1988 (launching nuclear-armed cruise missiles which destroy a major Soviet city), and their race to find a safe place to restart humanity. It could make a good movie or miniseries, too.
Oh yeah. It could even be done on a moderate budget, with real sets and a not-too-excessive amount of CGI. But the intellectual themes would probably get buried in any actual adaptation.
I like “Jericho” alright - I haven’t seen too many episodes, but it’s the closest thing we have to post-apoc on tv right now, and I’ll take any crumbs they’ll throw me.
I don’t know how great a show “A Canticle For Leibowitz” will be - unlike most pa fans, I couldn’t stand the book. It bored the crap outta me. I have the sequel in my basement, have had for years, and still haven’t been motivated to read it. (I liked most of the other books mentioned here.)
Some say it’s too soap opery. Thing is it is about a small town. They are cut off from the outside world and don’t know what is going on. Of course the show is going to be about the interaction of the characters. There is also some bad science but that can be somewhat excused because it comes from the characters and they could just be talking out their asses. Just like Lost they keep sprinkling clues about what happened to the outside world but they are not revealing too much. I like the show but don’t love it. Enough to DVR it but not enough to look forward to it every week.
I’d like to see a straight up nuclear war aftermath, perhaps set in the 80s. I’d like to see it portrayed realistically - none of the hysterical “we can destroy the world 7 times over! we’re all dead!” nonsense, nor the “nuclear explosions are almost the most minor inconvenience” of jericho.
A realistic look at how the war was executed - perhaps part of it could be told about the war after the opening salvos. In a military planning perspective, a full scale nuclear war was only the opening salvos of a bigger war - nuclear war isn’t nearly as destructive as the popular conception, and the military developed equipment and tactics to execute war during and after it. The conventional warfare accompanying an actual Russo-US war would’ve been very interesting.
But there’s drama in people coping with a realistic collapse of society. Finding a way to survive - first the bombs, then the aftereffects, then the other survivors. That sort of thing. There are a whole lot of stories that can be told in that context.
SenorBeef, the novel Warday, which I mentioned above in post #31, includes several short “interviews” with people who were involved in WW3 or its aftermath, including a top Defense Department executive who was aboard Air Force One when the President decided to use the launch codes. It’s chilling. Might be the kind of thing you’re interested in.
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