IGN

Disney has a secret Star Wars horror project in the works, according to Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy.

The mind behind the latest critical hit from a galaxy far, far away commented on Lucasfilm’s behind-the-scenes activities during a recent conversation with Business Insider. When asked how he might tackle a more sinister Star Wars project, he teased that the idea is one that Disney is already working on.

“They’re doing that. I think they’re doing that,” Gilroy said of the Star Wars horror project. “I think that’s in the works, yeah.”

If accurate, it would mean fans could finally see Star Wars explore the Dark Side in a way that’s never been seen on the screen before, though what exactly the project is remains shrouded in mystery. It could materialize as a TV series, movie, or even something else entirely, and there’s no word on who exactly is leading the charge creatively. It could be years before we hear more about what Lucasfilm is cooking up when it comes to a horror Star Wars project, but Gilroy’s comments at least suggest someone at Disney is listening.

“The right creator, and the right moment, and the right vibe … you can do anything,” Gilroy added, referencing his time with Andor. “So, my hope is that the show connects, and then we can pass along the favor that we were given from ‘Mandalorian,’ and we can pass along a good healthy backwind to someone else who wants to do something else cool.”

A no-holds-barred Star Wars horror movie has been the pie-in-the-sky dream for thousands of fans – and even Mark Hamill – for years. While the vast universe has spent decades exploring the Skywalkers and the many, many side characters that surround them, there is still plenty of room to see what some of its darker corners are hiding. It’s true that some spinoffs have looked at Star Wars through a scarier lens, but when it comes to big-budget productions, most projects tend to stick to stories that appeal to audiences of all ages.

Andor is one offshoot that has made a name for itself not only as one of the more mature Star Wars stories but one of the better ones, too. It made a splash with Season 1 in 2022 and remains a beloved slice of that universe today (we gave it a 9/10 in our review).

Gilroy and the rest of the team behind the show will bring an end to the wait for more when Andor Season 2 premieres its first three episodes April 22. For more, you can read up on how the success of Season 1 helped pave the way for Season 2. While we wait for those first episodes to drop later this month, you can check out our breakdown of some of the Star Wars projects coming in 2025.

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

There are a lot of different places where you can buy LEGO sets, but Barnes & Noble probably isn’t the first store you think of for such a thing. Nevertheless, there’s a big Barnes & Noble spring sale going on right now and there are some surprisingly good LEGO discounts within. One such deal is on the LEGO Dune Ornithopter, and the price is so good that not even Amazon has gone this low before.

The sale is a blanket 25% off select LEGO sets. This includes builds from franchises like Super Mario and Disney. But the overall best deal is the Ornithopter. It is the only LEGO Dune set that currently exists and it’s actually really awesome. You can also purchase it from Amazon for $8 more, but why would you?

LEGO Dune Atreides Royal Ornithopter Deal at Barnes & Noble

Entertainment has hit critical mass over the last decade, with more shows and movies being produced and released than ever before. It’s impossible to keep up with everything hitting the digital space, whether it be Premium Video on Demand (PVOD) or a traditional streaming network. With that in mind, we figured it was well past time for us to whip up a little something to help you keep up (and catch up) with all there is to watch in the big, wide world of digital viewing. And thus, the Streaming Rewind was born!

We’ll update this list at the end of each week so you can check out what you may have missed, and what’s coming up on the weekend. We’ll keep it a mix of popular releases and noteworthy lesser-known titles to help you find what’s worth taking the risk on as well as dive into a few things that we loved and why we loved ‘em, or just break down a show or movie that left us with some opinions. Sometimes, we’ll even have guest entries from other members of the IGN staff. If you’re not interested in all that and just want to see a bulleted list of what’s out there, pop on down to the New and Noteworthy and ICYMI sections.

Novocaine (Digital and Demand)

If you don’t get enough of Jack Quaid getting beat to hell in Prime Video’s The Boys, you can now see even more of it in Novocaine. Quaid stars alongside Prey’s Amber Midthunder as Nate, a boy in love and completely immune to physical pain. Imagine the chagrin of Sherry’s (Midthunder) captors when they realize they’ve kidnapped the wrong girl and found themselves face to face with a seemingly unstoppable force. Of course, the audience knows that while Nate can’t feel pain, he can, in fact, die (it’s in the trailer and everything). While it’s mostly just a tool to add to the suspense, it adds a level of stakes to this otherwise silly and heartfelt flick.

The Last of Us Season 2 (Max)

Joel and Ellie are back, and they’re joined by The Last of Us Part 2 favorites Dina, Jesse, Abby and more in The Last of Us Season 2. Catherine O’Hara (Gail), Isabela Merced (Dina), Kaitlyn Dever (Abby) and Beef breakout star Young Mazino (Jesse) join the already stellar cast as we head back to Jackson for another season of drama.

Yellowjackets Season 3 Finale (Showtime)

Yellowjackets Season 3 has been crazier than ever, leading to a mixed reception from fans and critics alike. But, if you enjoy women’s rights and women’s wrongs, this unhinged psychological thriller remains worth the watch. The Season 3 finale will bring this year’s arcs to a close, with the Yellowjackets getting gradually more and more, uh, eccentric, as time passes in both the past and the present.

New and Noteworthy This Week:

• Novacaine, April 8 — Digital and demand
• Mickey 17, April 8 — Digital and demand
• The Handmaid’s Tale Season 6, April 8 — Hulu
• Black Mirror Season 7, April 10 — Netflix
• Hacks, April 10 — Netflix
• Yellowjackets Season 3 Finale, April 10 — Showtime
• Doctor Who Season 2, April 12 — Disney+
• The Last of Us Season 2, April 13 — Max

ICYMI:

If you had too much going on last week, here are some of the notable things that premiered or debuted on streaming and digital that you may have missed.

• Paddington in Peru, April 1 — Digital and demand
• Opus, April 1 — Digital and demand
• Black Bag, April 1 — Digital and demand
• The Bondsman, April 3 — Prime Video
• Devil May Cry, April 3 — Netflix
• Jurassic World Chaos Theory Season 3, April 3 — Netflix
• Dying for Sex, April 4 — Hulu
• The Monkey, April 4 — Digital and demand
• Lazarus, April 4 — Netflix
• The White Lotus Season Finale, April 6 — Max

Your Friends & Neighbors begins with a tight shot of Jon Hamm slowly returning to consciousness in the middle of a million-dollar foyer, where he mysteriously lies in a large puddle of a dead man’s blood. Terrified and confused – and after a failed attempt to clean up the mess, likely out of panic – he tries to flee the scene only to trip and fall into the pool, where he ponders just how things took such a dire turn. If your instinct is to process this image as a metaphor, don’t worry – the former Mad Men star himself validates that assumption directly in a voiceover promising an unlikely story of a charmed life gone awry. It’s a sequence of events clearly designed to shock and seduce us. Instead, it plays like a scene you hazily remember seeing a few dozen times before, but can’t pinpoint exactly where.

By the end of the series opener, it’s clear that Apple TV+’s newest high-end drama wants to offer a tale that both titillates and shirks convention. After all, it’s not every day that you see a well-off man really question the affluence he’s spent his whole life chasing, nor do we plebeians often get a less-than-glossy glimpse into the lives of the One Percent. But beyond a handful of solid performances and some lo-fi larceny sprinkled throughout the seven episodes made available for review, Your Friends & Neighbors reads more like a concept that took all the wrong lessons from Robin Hood and Breaking Bad and leans perhaps too heavily on the assumption that the predictably messy lives of the rich are inherently must-watch.

Hamm stars as Andrew “Coop” Cooper, a once-successful hedge fund manager who is unceremoniously fired after a tryst with a lower-level employee. Between his abrupt ouster and a contract that prevents him from immediately accepting a role at a competing firm, he’s left with a few undesirable options. Rather than accept a too-junior position elsewhere or simply downsize from his multiple luxury homes, he decides to steal from his similarly affluent neighbors. It is a brash idea that Coop adopts with startling ease.

If there’s a reason behind that, creator Jonathan Tropper doesn’t really explore it in these first episodes. It’s partly why Your Friends & Neighbors’ pacing feels tricky. Things move slowly here, which would be totally fine if more of the journey was dedicated towards really digging into the stickier parts of Coop or building a somewhat cohesive case to support his bold pivot. But we’re not offered much beyond a rich man supporting the sometimes frivolous whims of his family and his desperation to keep up appearances. Not enough to totally tank a premise, but definitely not enough to build any real empathy towards our leading man.

Between robberies, Coop occasionally hints at a desire to engage in some much-needed introspection. But for every slight indictment of his sort-of former lifestyle, there’s even more evidence of his desperation to maintain it. Rather than interrogate the tension between judging the lives of his neighbors and literally risking freedom just to keep up, Tropper quickly ushers us towards the next scandal before we ask too many questions or even begin to grasp the motivation behind any of Coop’s choices.

These scandals, by the way, are fairly standard fare for the The Rich Are Messier Than You Think subgenre: adultery and occasional drug use, mainly. They maintain the show’s watchability, but are hardly worth any watercooler chat. Even the robberies themselves – you know, the show’s main attraction – are few and forgettable. As Coop lifts a stack of bills here and a too-expensive watch there, he provides us with insight on his peers’conspicuous consumption: owning pieces of jewelry worth enough to feed an entire midsized village or the perplexing, uber-exclusive process of procuring a $50,000 Hermès bag. It’s an excuse to employ some interesting, magazine-spread-worthy background on the things he’s stealing, which are coupled with some glossy-magazine-sleek visuals. But the details aren’t surprising if you’ve ever encountered a rich person in real life or in fiction. Perhaps that’s the occupational hazard of a baby criminal in his first season. But if you’re going to tease some heists, for the love of all things spicy, give us some real heists – or, at the very least, juicer secrets.

The speed at which the story progresses could be due to the buffet of side plots courtesy of Coop’s family and friends/victims. When he’s not an amateur thief, Coop is a bitter divorcé still reeling from the infidelity of his ex-wife, Mel (Amanda Peet), and a father to two vaguely contemptuous teens (Isabel Gravitt and Donovan Colan). Again, we’re only offered bits and pieces of the lore behind the family dynamic, which largely revolves around Mel’s choice to cheat with one of Cooper’s close friends, ex-NBA player Nick Brandes (Mark Tallman). We’re largely left in the dark as to why things fell apart, aside from a few fairly useless idioms from Coop: who admits to taking his “eyes off the ball” at some point during their union. We’re also not clear on what made him such a terrible father or why Mel, a therapist by trade, appears oddly apathetic about her betrayal. Still, there’s an undeniable allure to Peet, who leans into Mel’s complexities and finds moments to inject some humanity, all the while standing absolutely toe-to-toe with Hamm in both moments of peace and chaos.

This is where the show picks up in strength and potential: with its cast, who deliver despite their middling material rather than because of it. Hamm, as expected, is charming and knows how to deliver a line with darkly comedic flair. Olivia Munn, who shines as Coop’s soon-to-be-divorced neighbor and occasional fling, Samantha Levitt, avoids coming off as a cliched vixen thanks to her sharp wit and emotional depth. Her chemistry with Hamm is bested only by her chemistry with Peet as friends and unknowing (at least for Mel) love triangle rivals. In fact, the women of Your Friends & Neighbors, though largely underwritten as little more than sexy, sexy messes, are still far more compelling when given more to do than worry about Coop. This includes Lena Hall, who plays the younger sister who’s forced to move in with him, and Aimee Carrerro as Elena Benavides, a savvy, observant maid who inserts herself into his double life. While the heft of the its premise is seemingly placed on Hamm’s shoulders, much of the ensemble are still afforded private battles that, if the writers decide to dig a little deeper in future episodes and seasons (which are already partially guaranteed, given the show’s early renewal prior to debut) can provide some distraction from Coop’s undercooked insights.

To be clear, Your Friends & Neighbors is perfectly watchable if you still harbor some curiosity over the opulent lives of the rich. It’s stylish, occasionally humorous (sometimes unintentionally so, like in its almost cartoonish portrayal of coke usage), and yes, teeming with sexy moments thanks to its sexy, capable cast. But this isn’t quite the sneaky fish-out-of-water romp it purports itself to be, nor is its main character nearly as complex as his long stretches of self-indulgent banter suggest. If you’re looking for more, much like Coop’s decision to dabble in crime in the first place, there are better choices.

Chec kout Best Buy’s best gaming laptop deal of the week. Right now the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 RTX 4060 gaming laptop is on sale for just $1,199.99 shipped after a $400 off instant discount. This is a great price for a 14″ gaming laptop that weighs in at about 3 pounds, boasts a gorgeous high-resolution OLED display, and features premium build quality.

$400 Off Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 RTX 4060 Gaming Laptop

Here’s a rare standalone GPU offer you don’t want to miss out on if you’re currently building yourself a high-end gaming PC. Woot!, which is owned by Amazon, is offering the Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Vapor-X Gaming Graphics Card for $999.99. Amazon Prime members get free shipping, the rest of us pay just $6. This is currently the best price you’ll find for the best RX 7900 XTX on the market. The Nitro+ boasts an outrageously overbuilt cooling system, impeccable build quality, and as a result, high overclocking headroom. This GPU comes with a 90-day Woot! warranty.

Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU for $999.99

After months of little to no availability, Pokémon TCG: Journey Together Elite Trainer Boxes have been restocked at Amazon, and are actually staying in stock. No doubt shipping times might increase as time goes on, but it’s now finally possible to buy one of these bad boys off digital store shelves.

Amazon US: Pokémon TCG: Journey Together Elite Trainer Box

Larian has confirmed the hotly anticipated Patch 8 update for Baldur’s Gate 3 finally launches on Tuesday, April 15.

Patch 8 has been available in stress test form for some time now, but Larian has announced it is finally ready to be released to all players next week.

There’s a huge amount of new content coming to the record-breaking Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game with Patch 8, including 12 new subclasses. Elsewhere, there’s photo mode, cross-play, and Xbox Series S split screen. Check out the Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 8 patch notes for more.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Patch 8 new subclasses:

Bard – College of Glamour
As a College of Glamour Bard, you’ll find you have the power to heal friends and command enemies in equal measure. Cast Mantle of Inspiration to bestow your allies with 5 temporary hit points. And should an enemy attack while it is cast, they’ll find themselves Charmed. Play your hand correctly and you’ll be able to use this to your advantage with Mantle of Majesty. Target Charmed enemies and you can command them to flee, move closer, freeze, drop to the ground, or drop their weapon.

Barbarian – Path of Giants

Opt for the Path of Giants, and your newfound giant strength will make it easier for you to yeet friend and foe alike. Forget chugging potions to pump those muscles, these Barbarians benefit from the Giant’s Rage passive that grants both strength and size – allowing you to deal additional damage with Throw attacks. Pockets weighing you down? Not for you and your increased carry capacity!

Cleric – Death Domain

As a cleric of death, you’ll find a few dark new tricks up your sleeves – from spells that specialise in necrotic damage to three new necromancy cantrips. This includes Toll The Dead, a cantrip that causes 1~8 damage when your cleric rings the bell of impending doom – a number that scales if your target has already been damaged. We’ve also added the homebrewed ability to explode nearby corpses, damaging enemies.

Druid – Circle of Stars

These Druids look to the stars for answers, accessing powers beyond those offered through the classic wildshapes. Taking on one of three Starry Forms for their power – the constellations of the Archer, Chalice, and Dragon. Each one favours a different play style and strategy – the Archer dealing radiant damage with astral arrows, the life-giving Chalice restoring hitpoints to you and others nearby, and the wise Dragon, allowing you to deal damage with an added bonus to constitution rolls. The Starry Forms offer not just a celestial aesthetic, but practical, powerful options to enhance your role as a healer, fighter, or strategist.

Paladin – Oath of the Crown

You’ve been sworn to uphold the principles of law. Stay true to your oath and you’ll be rewarded with the power to aid your allies and disrupt your foes. Guide your companions in battle with Righteous Clarity, taunt enemies with strategic interrupts, and keep your party standing strong with Divine Allegiance, absorbing their damage while restoring their health.

Fighter – Arcane Archer

Mastering the dual arts of magic and marksmanship, the Arcane Archer subclass offers unique skills on top of new shooting animations. Banish foes to the Feywild, removing them from the battlefield for a turn, or unleash Psychic damage that forces enemies to make a Wisdom saving throw or be blinded until the start of their next turn.

Monk – Drunken Master

Putting the brew in homebrew, as the Drunken Master, you have the ability to consume alcohol straight from your inventory, as well as drink from bottles you see around the Sword Coast, in order to recover Ki. By sharing the bottle with your enemies using Intoxicating Strike, you’ll generate a buff towards your Armour Class and your Chance to hit Drunk targets. Drunk enemies are also susceptible to the Drunken Masters’ other abilities, like Sobering Realisation – which sobers up drunk targets, dealing physical and Psychic damage.

Ranger – Swarmkeeper

The Swarmkeeper subclass provides Rangers with three kinds of deadly swarms to assist them in combat. The Cloud of Jellyfish deals extra lightning damage – potentially shocking your enemy. The Flurry of Moths deals Psychic damage, giving you the potential to Blind your enemy. The Legion of Bees deals piercing damage and forces the enemy to make a strength-saving throw or be knocked back 15ft. Each swarm also has the ability to provide you with teleportation capabilities!

Rogue – Swashbuckler

This Rogue subclass introduces a range of new actions fit for the piratical life. Play dirty by tossing sand at enemies to Blind them. Flick your weapon at a target to Disarm them. Or use your new Fancy Footwork passive while meleeing your enemy to ensure they can’t make opportunity attacks against you for the rest of your turn.

Sorcerer – Shadow Magic

As a Shadow Magic Sorcerer, you deal in a form of magic that makes you deadliest in darkness. This subclass gives its sorcerer Superior Darkvision, as well as the ability to Shadow Walk between places of dim light or darkness. It also lets you call forth the perfectly homebrewed Hound of Ill Omen to harass your foes, and use Strength of the Grave to prevent you from being downed – ideal for those attempting Honour Mode runs.

Warlock – Hexblade

Hexblade Warlocks make a pact with an entity from the Shadowfell that manifests in the form of magical weapons. Curse your enemies and force their souls to do your bidding. Slay any enemy that isn’t generally an element of nature, construct, giant blob, or already dead, and you’ll be able to raise their spirit from their corpse for ten turns. This new summon can deal necrotic damage and will rip away a chunk of your enemy’s soul to provide your Hexblade Warlock with healing.

Wizard – Bladesinging

The Bladesinging subclass merges swordplay with wizardry. Expect new spellcasting animations when casting spells with your weapon, a new Bladesong ability to grant you supernatural speed, agility, and focus, plus gives you a bonus to any Constitution saving throw you make.

Patch 8, as Larian has signalled, is the final major update for the game and draws a line under what has been a remarkable time for the developer. Baldur’s Gate 3 launched to critical acclaim and enormous commercial success back in 2023, and has continued to sell strongly throughout 2024 and into 2025.

Larian shocked the gaming world by confirming its intention to leave Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dungeons & Dragons behind to work on a brand new game, which it teased at various points before announcing a media blackout to focus on the new mystery project.

D&D owner Hasbro. however, has teased plans to continue with the series. Speaking to IGN at the Game Developers Conference last month, SVP of digital games at Hasbro, Dan Ayoub, let on that with Larian moving on, Hasbro has “a lot of people very interested in Baldur’s Gate.”

“We’re kind of working out our plans for the future and what we’re going to be doing with that. And actually, in pretty short order, we’re going to have some stuff to talk about around that.”

Ayoub didn’t offer any further information about whether this “stuff” would be a full-blown new Baldur’s Gate in the works, or some sort of crossover like the characters had with Magic: The Gathering previously. However, he did acknowledge that he eventually wants a Baldur’s Gate 4, but that making one will likely take a while.

“It’s somewhat of an unenviable position,” he said. “I mean, we’re not in a hurry. Right? That’s the thing, we’re going to take a very measured approach… We’ve got a lot of plans, a lot of different ways to go about it. We’re starting to think about, okay, yeah, we’re ready to start dipping toes a little bit and talking about a few things. And I think, in really short order, like I said, again, not to over-tease that point, we’re going to have some other things to talk about around that.”

Meanwhile, Larian will celebrate the release of Patch 8 with a Twitch livestream in which senior systems designer, Ross Stephens, will run through the changes and additions.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

This article contains spoilers for Black Mirror Season 7.

Since Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror debuted in 2011, it has presented a nigh-on nihilistic view of technology. Heck, it’s right there in the name, explaining the darkness of how what we’re watching on the TV screen reflects back onto our real world. But something has shifted as the show has continued, with the seventh season that’s just dropped on Netflix presenting a surprising, new thesis for the series. Maybe, just maybe, it’s technology – and AI in particular – that’s going to save us. Or at the very least, save itself.

To get one thing out of the way, the AI that’s presented in Black Mirror is pure fantasy. This isn’t the sort of AI used in ChatGPT and programs of the like, which isn’t anything fancier than a predictive text algorithm. Nor is it the sort of AI that’s close to anything that exists commercially or otherwise in our real world. What Black Mirror presents is a fantasy future version of AI that truly is what the initials stand for: artificial intelligence. In the series, they are programs that have vaulted past computer status to become living beings in and of themselves. And it’s with that major difference that Brooker and company are aiming to teach us more about what humanity should be, through beings that are just achieving sentience on their own.

This isn’t true of every episode in the new season. The season premiere, “Common People,” is a classic dark tale of a couple trying to solve their healthcare woes in a system that upcharges them to keep the wife’s brain working. It’s bleak, often darkly comic, and puts Chris O’Dowd and Rashida Jones through a gristmill to make a point about how the healthcare system isn’t that different from spiraling cell phone charges, or, to bite the hand that feeds Black Mirror, Netflix’s constant price hikes. “Bête Noir” is a comic tale of high school revenge that lightly plays with the idea of the Mandela Effect, but if you’re looking any deeper into the episode, you’re doing it wrong. Heck, at one point one of the characters Googles “nut allergy” and the only result is “did you mean ‘not allegory’” in case you missed how this is more of an Outer Limits style episode than classic Black Mirror.

But the next four episodes all take a very different, surprising tact for Black Mirror, something that we’ve only seen sparsely peppered through the series thus far. “Hotel Reverie” is a romantic comedy between Issa Rae’s character, a famous actress trying to stretch her muscles, and a digital recreation of a classic actress, played by Emma Corrin. “Plaything” finds Peter Capaldi as the digital harbinger for The Throng, a game created by “Bandersnatch” madman played by Will Poulter, which may help bring about the singularity. “Eulogy” might be the most earnestly heartfelt episode of the series to date, as Paul Giamatti’s character takes a journey through a relationship in his past that he’d rather forget, after his former paramour’s passing. And the final episode, “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” checks back in on the fan-favorite Star Trek riff now that the in-game AI crew has gone off on their own adventures.

There’s darkness, for sure, particularly with “Plaything.” depending on how you feel about becoming the host for a digital symbiote, you might find it more disturbing than not. But each episode posits that the way forward is working with and learning from our AI counterparts. It’s a far cry from how Toby Kebbell lost himself to The Grain in Season 1’s “The Entire History of You,” or the dark, sad end of android Domhnall Gleeson in Season 2’s “Be Right Back.” Heck, this is 180 degrees from the murder machine of Season 4’s “Metalhead,” or any of the times technology led to a gruesome death on the show, aka most of them. Instead, this batch of four episodes shows how tech can lead to closure, independence, a bright future, or even true love.

So, how did we get here? How did a show so focused on the bleak side of sci-fi pivot to become a fantasy of what could be? The answer likely goes back to what is perhaps the most beloved episode of Black Mirror of all time, “San Junipero,” which is referenced constantly in Season 7. “Common People” finds the main couple celebrating their anniversary every year at an inn/restaurant called The Juniper. Issa Rae’s Brandy lives on 3049 Junipero Drive. Black Mirror has always included Easter eggs and references to other episodes; some overt, some not. But it’s hard to understate the importance of “San Junipero” to this steady change to the series, and to Season 7 in particular.

The fourth episode of Season 3, “San Junipero” starred Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis as Kelly and Yorkie, respectively, two seemingly young women who fall in love, only for it to turn out that Kelly is a dead copy of a person’s memories, while Yorkie is a dying old woman. It’s a beautiful lesbian love story, the first of its kind for the series, but in classic Black Mirror fashion it ends in a place that is either beautiful – they decide to be together forever in the digital afterlife – or disturbing – Yorkie is euthanized, and the final shot is a bunch of robot arms sorting drives, including their memories.

Ending aside, multiple other episodes since then have experimented with this weird, fresh idea of “hope.” Season 4’s “USS Callister,” also hailed as one of the best episodes of the series, found a bunch of cloned digital creations escaping their old-school Star Trek reality by killing their maker and entering a bold, new world. Later in Season 4, “Hang The DJ” seemed to present almost a heterosexual version of “San Junipero” involving a dating app, but ultimately fizzled its premise with a classic Black Mirror bummer of an ending. Same with Season 5’s “Striking Vipers,” which found two male friends striking up a sexual relationship in a Street Fighter-esque fighting game, only to discover it didn’t work at all in the real world. Three episodes taking halting steps towards a different tone over nearly a decade, but none as successful as “San Junipero.” Until now.

So… Why now? Perhaps the easiest answer is Big Tech’s current obsession with AI as the latest hot thing, something that is quickly proving to be not what consumers want at all. The faux AI they’re hocking is as dark as anything Black Mirror has ever peddled, from boiling large bodies of water and accelerating climate change to wrecking whole swathes of the internet with frequently incorrect results. What can Black Mirror possibly say about our current AI when people are using predictive text in place of therapy, and Google is telling chefs to add glue to pizza? There’s nothing left to parody, to heighten, because in the real world, it’s already so ridiculous, so dangerous.

Instead, Brooker’s crew has changed focus to the real heroes, the digital beings, since we humans have taken so little effort and so much time to decide our world isn’t worth saving as long as we can generate terrible-looking art with the wrong number of fingers.

This is something the show seemingly tackles head-on in “Hotel Reverie,” with Awkwafina’s Kimmy testing a new technology that will spruce up old black-and-white movies by inserting new, hot actors into the scenes. It goes wrong, of course, and there’s plenty of not-so-subtle commentary about how AI (the way we know it) can generate the beats of a script, from when characters should fall in love to how mysteries should be solved. But the heart of the episode, quite literally, is how Issa Rae’s Brandy, stuck in the computerized version of the movie, finds a kindred soul with Emma Corrin’s digital recreation – and it ends with a beautiful scene involving a phone call that matches Yorkie and Kelly’s “forever,” without the weird robot arms. It’s about how connections can be made despite the interference of algorithms, not because of them.

“Eulogy” presents the flipside of “The Entire History of You,” with Giamatti’s Phillip trying to forget his past so definitively that he’s ripped the face of his ex-girlfriend out of pictures. But it’s through his bond with The Guide (Patsy Ferran), who turns out to be an AI duplicate of his ex-girlfriend’s daughter, curating material for her memorial, that Phillip can confront his own past mistakes and move forward with his life. It’s not ChatGPT therapy, but it is the version that users think they’re getting, versus plagiarized text that’s missing the intuitiveness of emotion and consciousness.

And the highly anticipated “USS Callister: Into Infinity” pairs nicely with “Plaything,” both positing that perhaps humans are prone to violence and petty jealousy, while digital creations have the ability to be better, and do better. In the former, with one exception the human characters are all scrambling to either dominate each other or destroy. Meanwhile, the crew of the Callister just want the opportunity to live. And in “Plaything,” when the adorable Tamagotchi-esque creatures of the Throng are presented with murder, their reaction isn’t to kill – it’s to present Capaldi’s Cameron (played in flashback by Lewis Gribben) with another option: let them take that pain and rage away by forming machine-man hybrids.

While Black Mirror isn’t totally past punishing humans (see “Common People” in particular), the pivot in Season 7 has turned to a fantasy that flips from the common belief that a la Terminator, the machines are here to kill us. Instead, Black Mirror suggests by coexisting with them, they can teach us to be better humans. And in a worst-case scenario, replace us because we don’t seem to want ourselves to survive anyway.

Turns out that Black Mirror which we thought reflected back on us was a two-way mirror all along, and Brooker’s digital creations have been watching this whole time. Perhaps it’s a flight of fancy, perhaps not. But as the show’s thoughts on AI have evolved, and the real world’s reliance on destructive fake AI has devolved, Black Mirror may have a point. All hail our new machine overlords… Even if for now they’re just fantasy.

Dystopian fiction has always been a crucial player in the science fiction and horror genres, but in the 21st century it’s truly risen up to become its own dominant category. Here you’ll find the absolute best of TV dystopia, ranging from zombie hellscapes to AI apocalypses to smaller pitfalls, like societies fully dominated by social media points or worlds where everything you see gets recorded in your brain like video files.

Massive plagues, nuclear winters, robot uprisings, time travel paranoia, and people vanishing into thin air — these 19 TV shows (plus one miniseries) represent the cleverest, scariest (and often most poignant) — dystopian stories ever told. Some are post-apocalyptic while some are just people in an office with a microchip in their head that’s split their consciousness. All we’re looking for is a dark vision of the future, near or far, that crackles with intensity, intrigue, and imagination.

If movies are what you seek, however, then check out the Top 10 Apocalypse Movies of All Time and the 6 Post-Apocalyptic Movies You’ve Probably Never Seen. Heck, IGN readers even voted on their Favorite Post-Apocalyptic World from Movies and TV!

But if it’s TV you’re after, then continue on as we dig into Fallout, Severance, The Walking Dead, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Last of Us, and more. Here are the Top 20 Dystopian TV Shows of All Time!

20. Twisted Metal

We’ll kick the list off with some riotous carnage. 2024’s Twisted Metal adaptation, from Zombieland’s Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, was exactly the type of violent silliness that was called for (and exactly what the Borderlands movie should have been, for what it’s worth). Anthony Mackie, Stephanie Beatriz (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Encanto), and the tag team combo of Samoa Joe and Will Arnett (body and voice for Sweet Tooth) star in this clever and goofy showcase of a world of walled-off cities and expendable couriers used to drive and deliver packages across the dangerous post-apocalypse wasteland.

Watch the first season of Twisted Metal on Peacock. Season 2 is coming this summer.

19. Paradise

The newest show on this list — on which there are actually a good number of recent series — is Hulu’s Paradise. And without giving too much away for those who haven’t caught the first season, let’s just say that it’s a White House murder whodunnit? amidst the backdrop of an extinction level event. Emmy-winner Sterling K. Brown reunites with This is Us creator Dan Fogelman for one of the best mystery box shows since Lost went off the air. Playing trusted Secret Service agent Xavier Collins to James Marsden’s affable President Cal Bradford, Brown plays both sides of the deep conspiracy coin amidst a backdrop of a world-ending catastrophe. Julianne Nicholson and Sarah Shahi also star.

Watch the first season of Paradise on Hulu. Season 2 has been greenlit.

18. Into the Badlands

Only a few shows presented here actually kick ass on a visceral, violent level, and Into the Badlands, which comprises some truly superior fight choreography, leads that particular pack. From Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville, Wednesday, Shanghai Noon), this from-the-ashes actionfest shows us the world 500 years from now, ruined by war, where a U.S. territory known as the Badlands is ruled by Barons and dominated by blade and melee weapons (guns are a no no). Daniel Wu plays one of the realm’s most lethal warriors, caught up in all of the dangerous drama unleashed by this ravaged world. A stirring, bloody, dystopian soap that’s worth watching.

Watch all three seasons of Into the Badlands on Netflix or AMC+.

17. The Last Man on Earth

Will Forte’s comedic cringefest is about a silly, selfish loser, Phil, who, after months on his own following a world-ending pandemic, discovers there are actually other survivors out there. The problem is Phil’s an awkward sociopath and the hearty laughs unspool as only Mr. Forte can provide. Like Twisted Metal a few entries back, The Last Man on Earth is a rare comedy we’re including to break up the dystopian dourness. It’s ambitious, audacious, and truly gut-busting. Kristen Schaal, January Jones, Mary Steenburgen, and Jason Sudeikis co-star.

Watch all four seasons of The Last Man on Earth on Hulu.

16. The 100

One of the true tenured CW long-timers, that, you know, wasn’t Supernatural or part of the Arrowverse was The 100 — a sci-fi saga, loosely based on books by Kass Morgan, about a hundred teenage delinquents sent down to the Earth’s surface from an orbiting, malfunctioning Ark to see if the planet’s surface is survivable following a nuclear war that wiped out everything.

Over the course of 100 episodes (it was a must!), these characters endure harsh elements, brutal war, a dastardly AI, interdimensional travel, and some surprisingly dark content. In fact, The 100, which deviates pretty substantially from the novels, may just be the grimmest show on this countdown.

Watch all seven seasons of The 100 on Netflix.

15. Jericho

In the biggest case of fan appeasement since the Firefly movie Serenity got made, CBS’ Jericho was brought back for a second season, saved from cancellation by fervent fans who ran a strong SAVE JERICHO campaign. Sure, it only lasted for one more season, and plans for a follow-up movie were eventually scrapped, but Jericho still stands as one of the most famous cult series ever.

Skeet Ulrich, Lennie James (ahead of The Walking Dead), Michael Gaston, Ashley Scott, and Gerald McRaney starred in this nuclear fallout drama about the residents of the fictional city of Jericho, Kansas, isolated due to loss of power and communications. Eventually war breaks out with a neighboring community while, in the background, a new militarized government sets up shop in the Western half of the U.S.

Created by Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure), Stephen Chbosky (author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower), and Jonathan E. Steinberg (Black Sails, Percy Jackson and the Olympians), Jericho’s all about maintaining one’s humanity while trying to reboot society.

You can watch the two seasons of Jericho on Paramount+.

14. Westworld

You’ll see Jonathan Nolan’s name twice on this list but we wanted to call out a secret third Jonah Nolan show, Person of Interest. It started as a CBS procedural about a billionaire and a depressed mercenary saving people’s lives based on a surveillance algorithm and it expanded brilliantly into a fully serialized series about warring AIs. It’s not a “dystopian” show, per se, because it was about characters trying to prevent a dystopia, but still.

It’s also a great precursor for what Nolan would do on Westworld, an AI apocalypse series that actually shows you, over the course of four seasons, how the world ends. What starts as a robotic Wild West theme park experiencing malfunction and massacre (featuring the first sparks of AI becoming “aware”) spins out into some serious apocalyptic wild swings. In fact, this could have easily been the world our heroes on Person of Interest were fighting to stop.

Season 4 was not meant to be the end-end but HBO un-renewed the series after already having greenlit a Season 5. Evan Rachel Wood, Ed Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright, Aaron Paul, and James Marsden starred.

The four seasons of Westworld are not available on Max. You can purchase them on various platforms or watch Season 1 on Tubi.

13. The Walking Dead

At one point, for a couple years, The Walking Dead was the highest-rated show on TV. Sure, the zombie genre had been running very hot all through the 2000s but nothing like this had ever made it to TV. Based on the acclaimed Robert Kirkman comic series, The Walking Dead got people to watch horror who never would normally. Heck, entire families watched this together and it often featured gore that was exponentially nastier than you’d see in a movie.

The Walking Dead, pure and simple, worked and when it was one fire it was a juggernaut of action, suspense, love triangles, heartache, and nail-biting close calls. And it would place even higher on the list if AMC had just let it go when the time was right. But now, after well over a decade on the air, it still carries on with multiple spinoffs. Now, to be fair, some of the new shows have merit, but really only for die-harders. That being that, there was a time when Rick, Daryl, Carol, Michonne, Glenn, Maggie, and the rest of the zompocalypse survivors ruled the f’n roost.

Watch all 11 seasons of The Walking Dead on Netflix.

12. Squid Game

Man, dystopia loves a game show. It loves competition. Whether it’s stories like Battle Royale or The Hunger Games, The Running Man, Death Race 2000 or even the fun one-off commercial in RoboCop advertising Climbing for Dollars (where to collect cash the player has to climb a rope over a pit of snarling, angry dogs). We’ve been condemning late-stage capitalism for years and one of the best methods is to create entertainment about people’s desperate need to survive.

It’s no wonder then that viewers flooded to South Korea’s Squid Game in 2021, making it Netflix’s most-watched series to this day. We watched as a divorced father and gambling addict joined the ranks of 455 players on a crazed, nightmarish game show where those in debt play lethal children’s games for a jackpot prize. Squid Game has a sharp brutality and keen social commentary, making for compelling, addictive, and squirm-worthy TV.

Watch the two seasons of Squid Game on Netflix. The third and final season will be released on June 27, 2025.

11. Fallout

Jonathan Nolan’s latest dive into dystopia is his successful adaptation of Fallout, the huge game franchise about the wasteland future world of an alternate history America. This time, however, unlike the morose machinations of Person of Interest and Westworld, Fallout sticks to the giddy gallows humor of the games, acting not so much as a retelling of one of the popular games but as a new Fallout installment that exists alongside them.

Nolan, co-creating with Lisa Joy and Bethesda Game Studios, nails the tone of the games while also canonically expanding the lore and adding to the mosaic. Yellowjackets’ Ella Purnell stars as a Vault Dweller, with no above-ground life experience, exploring the outside world in search of her missing father (Kyle MacLachlan). There she encounters a Brotherhood of Steel hopeful, Maximus (Aaron Moten), and a former Hollywood cowboy (Walton Goggins) who’s still alive, and disfigured, 200 years after doomsday thanks to radiation. Fallout is a darkly comic dive into an insane world of ghoulish gunslingers, mech-suited mercs, mutated beasts, and Vault Boy propaganda.

You can watch the first season of Fallout on Prime Video. Season 2 has been greenlit.

10. Black Summer

The superb sleeper on the list, Black Summer is the greatest zombie show to ever stream. Even if you’ve tired of the genre and are done with undead hordes terrorizing trembling survivors, we implore you to check out this sinister, inventive descent into hell. Z Nation creators Karl Schaefer and John Hyams envisioned Black Summer as a spinoff, or companion piece of sorts, but where Z Nation had a tongue-in-cheek quality, Black Summer is a vicious, scathing potboiler that doesn’t let up. Fast-moving zombies are taking over the world and our main characters are just merely surviving. The entire time. It’s relentless and superb.

It’s also uniquely formatted, separated into segments titled with characters’ names. Segments that can run from one minute to 10. And the episodes themselves can be 40 minutes or 20. Black Summer is lean and mean. It’s just the world falling. You know, the s*** that happened when Rick Grimes was in a coma.

You can watch the two seasons of Black Summer on Netflix.

9. Silo

By listing Silo here, we’re also giving a gentle nod to the Snowpiercer series which, after switching networks, wrapped up its fourth and final season last summer. We’re comparing the two because that show and Silo give us a destroyed, desolate future — Snowpiercer of ice, Silo of (as yet) unknown ruin — where the last survivors of the human race are stored away inside a big metal tube that’s their only chance of survival, and also because of the exploration they both tackle of class revolution. The front of the train/back of the train dynamic is now the top of the Silo/bottom of the Silo struggle.

Yes, instead of a train, Silo is… well, set in a massive subterranean silo. One that contains ten thousand people. One of whom is Juliette, a headstrong engineer from the low levels who is mysteriously named as the new “Sheriff” following the death of the previous one. Silo, based on an acclaimed book series, is a stunning show, acting as almost a star vehicle for powerhouse Rebecca Ferguson as she takes Juliette through a clever conspiracy thriller set among a population whose histories have been erased, and all past artifacts outlawed, so that they don’t even know what’s outside the silo or what the Before Times were like. Tim Robbins, Common, Rashida Jones, and Steve Zahn co-star.

You can watch the first two seasons of Silo on Apple TV+. Season 3 has been greenlit.

8. Severance

Sticking with Apple TV+ here, Severance is the streamer’s biggest hit ever, mesmerizing fans with a quirky, upsetting dystopia where an experimental brain chip allows people to split their work self into a separate consciousness — unleashing an avalanche of ethical dilemmas about creating life that’s just imprisoned labor.

At first, the premise of Severance sounded like a Black Mirror episode stretched out (particularly aspects of the “White Christmas” special) but it quickly established it’s own offbeat world, tone, and look, borrowing from Terry Gilliam, Jacques Tati, and more for a marvelous mystery series that gives a nefarious new meaning to the term “return to office.” Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, Britt Lower, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken star in this devilish head-scratcher from creator Dan Erickson and EP/director Ben Stiller.

You can watch the first two seasons of Severance on Apple TV+. Season 3 has been greenlit.

7. Station Eleven

“I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die.”

The lone miniseries on the list, Station Eleven, based on the book by Emily St. John Mandel, looks at the world during, and after, a pandemic kills off most of the population and reduces society to scattered, primitive clusters. We follow a girl, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler and Mackenzie Davis), as she survives the collapse of everything, growing up to join a traveling performance troupe that traverses the Great Lakes region performing Before Times plays and poems.

Leftovers writer/producer Patrick Somerville once again deals with global colony collapse, hope, love, and cults, gifting us with the most Leftovers-feeling series since The Leftovers. Station Eleven is transcendent TV, the type that touches your soul. Unfortunately, it was released during 2020 when hardly anyone wanted to watch a story where a virus wipes out all civilization, but those who saw it know how powerful and beautiful the series is.

You can watch all 10 episodes of Station Eleven on Max.

6. Black Mirror

An astute, mostly upsetting anthology series, acting as our 21st century Twilight Zone, Black Mirror is a phenomenal collection of mini-movies about imagined futures for humanity that range from uniquely augmented to downright depressing and diabolical. Focusing mostly on technology, or sometimes social media, visionary Charlie Booker’s magnum opus about desperation, distraction, and unchecked advanced tech has delivered some of the most disturbing TV in the history of the medium.

Black Mirror has also given us some remarkable love stories, from the acclaimed “San Junipero” to the algorithm-busting “Hang the DJ.” Of course, counter to that are the chapters that drop the floor out from under you, whether it’s a world where people are forced to soulcycle for currency (“Fifteen Million Merits”) or where their consciousness can be transferred in terrible ways (“Black Museum,” “White Christmas,” “USS Callister”) or even — to some a devastatingly timely story — a future where every single social interaction is given a rating (“Nosedive”). Black Mirror is harrowing pulp that resonates deep within.

You can watch all seven seasons of Black Mirror on Netflix.

5. 12 Monkeys

Dismissed as a bad idea, as most TV shows based on beloved movies wind up being in the end, 12 Monkeys took the time travel ball and ran the f’n distance. Over four seasons, 12 Monkeys went from being a tweaked version of the Terry Gilliam movie (and, in turn, Chris Marker’s La Jetée from 1962), with the central characters you’re more or less familiar with (considering how the movie was a big showcase for Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt), and ballooned into a first-class adventure about the concept of predestination versus free will, raising the bar at every turn.

12 Monkeys begins with Aaron Stanford’s Cole attempting to go back in time to stop a world-ending plague, a more basic nod to the movie, but it blossoms into full exploration of the post-apocalyptic world that Cole comes from. It’s really in the later seasons that the show became its own tremendous, wonderful thing. It’s a severely underrated time travel thriller that needs to be checked out. Amanda Schull, Emily Hampshire, Kirk Acevedo, and Todd Stashwick co-star.

The four seasons of 12 Monkeys are not currently streaming, but they are purchasable.

4. The Handmaid’s Tale

One of the bleakest entries on this list, The Handmaid’s Tale can be a difficult watch. It unapologetically lays out a cruel, oppressive, misogynistic future where a second Civil War has created a totalitarian regime that uses woman as child-bearing slaves. Margaret Atwood’s pivotal 1985 novel is vividly brought to life here, haunting us with every twist and turn.

It’s a heavy series, not to be binged lightly, but it’s headlined by Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss and her ferocious performance as Offred, a woman who’s captured and forced into a life of servitude amidst a new world of horrifying religious extremism. The Handmaid’s Tale is meticulously paced, utterly suspenseful, and sometimes, honestly, too much to bear. Joseph Fiennes, Yvonne Strahovski, Ann Dowd, Alexis Bledel, and Bradley Whitford also star.

Watch all six seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu.

3. The Last of Us

The Last of Us isn’t just the best video game-adapted TV series of all time, it’s just a flat out brilliant watch, taking a magnificent story set up from the Naughty Dog game franchise and transferring it to television, adding bold new takes, twists, and turmoil while also keeping the core elements that worked — namely the relationship between near-suicidal apocalypse survivor Joel and plucky, vengeful teen Ellie (who just might be the key to saving the entire world from its hostile mushroom zombielords).

Casting was paramount here, and stars Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey deftly deliver the Joel and Ellie we need for this entire zombie (but not “zombie”) series to work. At its gruesome heart, The Last of Us is a story about love and loss and the family we find when we think all hope has been extinguished. The best example of this is “Long, Long Time,” an episode that took two side characters from the game and extrapolated one of the greatest love stories ever put on screen.

The show is also about impossible decisions and terrible choices, the hallmarks of great dystopian horror and sci-fi. Season 2 is finally upon us and most viewers simply won’t be ready for the intense drama ahead. Craig Mazin (“Chernobyl”) and Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann have given us back the heart that The Walking Dead lost years ago.

Watch the first season of The Last of Us on Max. Season 2 premieres April 13, 2025.

2. The Leftovers

Not only does The Leftovers, which lasted three glorious seasons on HBO, uniquely present a world struggling with both grief and existential anxiety following a mini-Rapture type event, where 2% of the population vanished without explanation, but it also just happens to be one of the greatest TV shows of all time. Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta (loosely adapting his own novel) present a rich landscape of wondrous happenings and vivid characters, toplined by Justin Theroux’s Kevin and Carrie Coon’s Nora.

The Leftovers evolves from a strong-yet-forlorn first season into an exceptionally magical experience in Seasons 2 and 3, never answering why the people disappeared but instead living within that uncertainty and painting a vast mural of both trauma and joy. This is a moral imperative for TV lovers. Not your typical “dystopia,” but a world gone mad nonetheless.

Watch all three seasons of The Leftovers on Max.

1. Battlestar Galactica

The work that Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica did for legitimizing genre TV cannot be overstated. Science fiction was always about showing us a mirror — using parables, metaphors, and tucked away social commentary — but BSG was a landmark show. It was a powerful, mature space odyssey during the most recent Golden Age of TV, able to easily compete with the Sopranos, Shields, and Wires of the era.

As for the “dystopia” aspect? Absolutely. It’s just maybe not what we’ve come to expect over the years. It’s a future hellscape… for a different, past iteration of people. A cautionary tale, if you will, as we follow the remnants of humanity fleeing through space after a mass genocide carried out by their own AI creations — Cylons, who now look just like humans. It’s an expert look at post-9/11 fear and paranoia with a stellar ensemble, including Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell, Katee Sackhoff, Tricia Helfer, and more. With massive moments and cunning twists that will make your heart both soar and sink, BSG reworked a clunky ’70s sci-fi series, which had some retro cult love, and gave it grandeur and gravitas.

Watch all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica on Prime Video (through the end of April).

What’s your favorite dystopian TV series? Is there one we missed that you’d have liked to see on the list? Vote in our poll and sound off below.