Revolution, Jericho, Terra Nova: The Mad Max-style series that got canceled

Obscure Mad Max-style series: Cancelled before the end

Terra Nova cost more than one million dollars per episode and four times that amount for the pilot episode. It lasted only one season. This figure sums up better than any theory what happens to the post-apocalyptic genre on television: the more ambitious the set, the sooner the cancellation. From this contradiction has emerged a catalog of obscure Mad Max-style series, some buried after a few episodes and others recycled years later purely by word of mouth.

The two titles that open almost any list are Revolution and Jericho. The first premiered in 2012 with a premise seen a thousand times: a global blackout left the world without electricity 15 years ago and a group of citizens tries to find out the cause while the territory has fragmented into militias and de facto governments. Jericho, from 2006, arrived earlier and through another door: a nuclear mushroom cloud appears on the horizon and the inhabitants of a Kansas town suspect they may be the last Americans alive. From there, reconstruction, secrets, and neighbors who are not what they seem.

Why do they cancel almost all post-apocalyptic series?

For money, and there is little more to squeeze out. The recurring argument is budgetary: recreating a devastated world is expensive, so production confines itself to limited sets—a ship, a town, a camp—and the script lasts exactly as long as it takes to close the main intrigue. Terra Nova, with Steven Spielberg as producer, started with data that were not good but not catastrophic, and yet it was expensive to sustain; they cut it leaving everything open for a second season that never came.

Jericho had a different fate. The cancellation provoked such a flood of requests that the network filmed a second season, shorter and rushed, which also failed to close anything. Some argue there are two different endings and neither resolves the matter. Revolution had no rescue: it was left halfway. The pattern repeats so often it has become part of the experience of watching the genre.

Realism vs. spectacle: From Children of Men to Mad Max

When the enthusiast looks for verisimilitude, the reference is not television. The titles most cited as a plausible portrait of a collapse are Children of Men and The Road; the rest oscillate between the deliberately exaggerated and the tasteless product. Mad Max works as an aesthetic icon, not as a simulation, and no one disputes that. Behind almost all of the subgenre sits a novel, The Postman by David Brin, converted into a staple text from which reconstruction dystopias drink.

From there also comes the most repeated complaint about current productions: that series from more than ten years ago tolerated the passage of time better than those now, to which a part of the audience attributes a militant tone that robs them of credibility. It is an ideological assessment, not a measurement of audiences, and it is advisable to take it as what it is: a consumption preference, not a fact.

To the Lake, Years and Years, and Station Eleven: The international turn

Outside the US circuit there is interesting material. To the Lake, a Russian production available on Netflix, starts with an escape from Moscow as the city falls apart; the first chapters are uphill, but from the exit of the capital things change. It is recommended to watch it in the original version with subtitles. Years and Years, six one-hour episodes, is something else: a gradual collapse, without a manual apocalypse, that projects what the world will be like in the next decade and is uncomfortable precisely because it is so close.

Closer to the classic collapse is Station Eleven, a ten-chapter miniseries of which seven had been broadcast at the time of conversation. Twenty years after a deadly flu, a group of actors travels through towns performing Shakespeare. There are no biker gangs or chases: the drama is culture trying to survive the elements.

The list is completed with names ranging from the Cretaceous to the flu: Terra Nova and its human colony among dinosaurs, Black Summer and its second round of zombies, The Collapse, Z Nation as low-budget entertainment, Into the Night, The Leftovers, The 100, which starts strong and dilutes, Colony or Falling Skies.

Collapse films that are still recommended

In cinema, the classic weighs more than novelty. The last man on earth, with Vincent Price; The Last Man Alive, with Charlton Heston; and When the Day Breaks, which still functions as a warning. Small and little-seen titles are also rescued: The Divide, Embers, Here Alone, The Day, The Last Hours, or the Japanese Extermination, from 1980, in which everything starts with a flu. And a very short French production that plays well with tension, although its ending disappoints much of those who defend it.

With such a history of cancellations, it is surprising that the genre continues to be produced and that each new season brings a new title willing to stay halfway. Does it make sense to continue starting series that no one will finish?