Tonight the second series of Survivors begins on BBC1, with the planet ravaged by a nasty virus and the population reduced to a handful of nice middle-class people – you know, just your standard post-apocalyptic future. Except what with all those supplies-stuffed supermarkets and stately homes standing empty, things don't actually seem that bad. If you can put up with a lot of corpses, Julie Graham endlessly shouting for missing son Peeeeter, oh, and the deaths of all of your loved ones, Survivors seems a pretty cosy post-apocalyptic world to live in.
But how does it measure up against other TV visions of a broken future? Which would you live in should the worst happen? Consider wisely. There's a lot to weigh up.
Day of the Triffids
By the end of the original TV Day of the Triffids, things don't seem so totally awful. Just decamp to the Isle of Wight and carry out the occasional cull with a flame thrower when the vegetation looks frisky. Like the Good Life – but with less annoying neighbours.
Dollhouse
In the final episodes of season one, Joss Whedon reveals the illogical conclusion of the show's already implausible mindwipe technology: all mindwipes all the time, in a burnt out LA. Not so great. Your personality being erased at any moment is bad enough, but you'd also have to face up to everyone's eventual fate being in the hands of Eliza Dushku.
The Tribe
In this Kiwi import, the world's adults had all died of a mysterious virus. But the future was bright. Very bright, as the surviving kids had all dyed their hair various rainbow shades; the manufacturers of gaudy hair dye being presumably untouched by this end of days.
Dead Set
In Charlie Brooker's Night of the Living Dead/Big Brother mash-up no one survived. The world was completely overrun with zombies – literally, as those zombies could really shift. Sounds bad, but the show winks that we're probably no worse off. Cynical!
Threads
It's hard to find even the shabbiest silver lining to living in the nuked-out world offered by this notoriously frightening mockumentary. Unless you harbour a deep desire to take a bloody bite out of a dead sheep with impunity, there isn't much to recommend it.
'The Event'
Even more horrifying than Threads is That Mitchell and Webb Look's 'The Event'. A broken future so horrible that just the glimpses we see through the filter of a deranged gameshow being played by PTSD-stricken survivors are shudder-inducing. When David Mitchell's host intones in BBC-friendly RP "Ah, the children, if only we could have saved some of the children", Threads seems quite cosy in comparison.
So, if you had to pick one to live in, which would be your preferred TV vision of the end of the world as we know it? Would you rather contend with having your personality erased, getting satirically zombified by Davina McCall or fighting off carnivorous vegetables? Mitchell and Webb aside, the nuclear winter of Threads seems easily the bleakest. And that's the one based on real science and technology that actually exists now. Damn!
