Why we love the escapism of apocalyptic dramas

Yahoo

28-03-2025

Disney's streaming hit Paradise – a political thriller that sees the murder of a former president in a peaceful community – leans into dystopian themes around apocalypse survival and living in a sealed world. The drama joins an growing array of TV shows and films exploring similar ideas.
In Apple TV's compelling drama Silo, civilisation has resorted to living and working deep in an underground storage facility as a means to protect humanity from the wasteland above.
Michelle and Barack Obama's Netflix thriller Leave The World Behind depicts the US facing chaos and unrest as a cybersecurity attack takes down the country's entire technological infrastructure, leading to catastrophic scenes of fallen cities on fire.
Similar tropes appear in Zero Day, starring Rober De Niro as a former president tasked with finding out who is behind a cyber attack that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of people.
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And then there is The End, a climate-crisis musical starring Tilda Swinton that dips into the strange world of a wealthy family living deep underground in a luxurious bunker, decades after an environmental catastrophe has hit the earth.
Dystopian dramas are clearly in vogue right now, but films and TV dramas have often reflected the fears and anxieties of their times. A Clockwork Orange (1971) portrayed the class conflict and wanton violence of the 1970s. TV series Threads (1984) tapped into fears of a nuclear attack. Ghost in the Shell (1995) focused on identity in an increasingly technology-obsessed world. And Children of Men (2006) centred on the bleak terror of a world without children.
More recently, The Walking Dead (2010 onwards) focused on what it means to cling onto humanity in an unrelenting world, while Squid Game (2021-) is a dystopian reflection of capitalism exploring the circumstances that drive desperate people to participate in a deadly competition for money.
My research explores cultural aspects of consumption and one of my research interests is forms of escapism, mainly provided by films, television and video games. A question that sometimes arises is whether we actually desire dystopia.
Well, streaming giants might argue it's good for business. Zero Day has remained in Netflix's top-ten chart for the past month, Apple has renewed Silo for two more seasons, and Disney just ordered a second season of Paradise. The third and final season of Squid Game will air in June – previous seasons have broken Netflix records for downloads and views.
This trend for dystopian movies and TV shows underscores the public appetite for this content, despite its alarmingly prescient feel and tone. Paradoxically, this seems to starkly contrast with the notion that people turn to video games, movies and boxset binges to escape the mundanity of everyday life and the wearisome realities that we must contend with.
In my research with colleagues at Lancaster University, we explored these issues: when reality is disrupted in some unexpected way, our beliefs and assumptions about how we think the world should operate are challenged.
Drawing on interviews, we explored participants' experiences of bingeing TV shows against a backdrop of changing real-world events and the impact these changes had on their ability to suspend their disbelief. The people we spoke to turned to culture for a sense-making escape.
Escapism here is less about feeling abandoned and more about a search for hope and rediscovering the coordinates for our existence. Dystopian narratives might provide some food for thought: how would we cope if the apocalyptic events portrayed on screen were to really occur?
TV dramas like Zero Day and films like Leave the World Behind identify and zoom in on the terrors and anxieties of the present: AI and the 'rise of the machine', war and global instability, profound inequality, disinformation, online hostility and cyber threats. However, in doing so, these dramas can also exemplify what might be required to transform or alter a dystopian reality, meaning as viewers we engage in a form of 'critical dystopia'.
Our appetite for dystopian narratives could derive from the idea that we never imagine ourselves to be the subject of some major catastrophic event. In a discussion about dystopia, critical marketing academics Alan Bradshaw, James Fitchett and Joel Hietanen explored how we often equate dystopian events and imaginings as happening to others, not necessarily us.
This is aided by the fact that we often occupy the role of a distant onlooker, not the perspective of someone living under the catastrophic events being portrayed.
Bradshaw, Fitchett and Hietanen argue that much of our everyday existence consists of fairly mundane encounters and repetitive experiences. As an antidote to this safe ordinariness, we are drawn to extreme versions of life, and harbour repressed fantasies and desires of destruction and catastrophe. So we indulge in dystopian desires and impulses, albeit at a distance or vicariously through video games, movies, books and TV shows from the comfort of our sofas.
Finally, some people seem to find a sense of enjoyment in imagining their own ruin – what is described as a 'death drive', that simultaneously contradicts yet co-exists with self-preservation instincts. Philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek suggests that there are people who derive pleasure from dystopian narratives, fascinated at the prospect of their own annihilation.
However, through optimistic endings, dystopian dramas imply that we may be able to intervene, prevent or even reverse the alarming consequences. We then indulge in fantasies of a new utopia in an attempt to return to our known reality, or receive a prophetic nudge in the direction of a more improved world to replace the dystopia.
In this case, viewers of edge-of-your-seat dramas like Zero Day and Paradise search for hope and relief, and as detached observers fantasise about how catastrophe and self-annihilation can be paused or even better, averted.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Scott Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.