Apocalypse: this end-of-days survival show is an absolute slam dunk — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Apocalypse launched on Channel 4 on Sunday 13 September at 9pm, placing seven strangers at the edge of an abandoned town with no access to phones, light, electricity, or working infrastructure
- The contestants are pre-selected "types" rather than ordinary civilians, including a content creator, a Paralympian, a theatre director, an event emcee, a diesel mechanic, and an Australian cattle farmer the reviewer likens to Crocodile Dundee
- Resource scarcity escalates fast — a can of Spam found near an abandoned trailer is rationed to a quarter of a tomato a day, with some contestants going three to four days without eating
- The discovery of a second team in the town sparks tribalism: the Spam is stolen and contestants arm themselves with baseball bats in an open conflict
- Psychologist and self-identified princess Kiera gasps that "tanks are running low" just 45 minutes after arriving, before she has even pried the boards off a food mart
- The reviewer frames the show as a bleak mirror of human nature and a successor to Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road and Channel 4's earlier surveillance-state show Hunted, distinguished by its urban rather than wilderness setting
Why it matters: Channel 4 is betting that climate-, AI- and pandemic-fuelled apocalyptic anxiety has ripened into demand for unscripted social-collapse experiments; the early episodes deliver that promise with visceral escalation — baseball-bat skirmishes, multi-day starvation and factional breakdown — giving the format an editorial bite that wilderness survival shows have typically lacked.
Ask SkimNews
