Everyone loves a good bit of storytelling and Preppers are no exception to this – after all, we’re just people.

Here is a list of some favourite prepper TV Shows and Movies which have a good SHTF angle to them. As a little bonus, I’ll also state if they have any good prepper tips. I won’t go into much detail as that is what my Movie and TV breakdowns are for but I’ll give you a gist.

Note: This is a living article and I will add to it from time to time, when I update it, I’ll bump its date so it appears at the top again.

Total disclosure: I’ve been sick for the last few weeks and my brain is not firing on all cylinders so this post might be a bit crap. I’ll review and re-edit it once my sick-brain has gone away if it proves rubbish.

TV Shows

The Walking Dead

Cover image for The Walking Dead

This one probably requires no introduction but just in case: The series is a human-drama set during a zombie apocalypse, it focuses on Rick Grimes, a deputy sheriff who comes out of a coma a few weeks into the disaster, he quickly finds a group of survivors (which luckily includes his wife and son) and set about trying to keep everyone alive. Its a gritty and harrowing TV series which never pulls its punches and it is well worth the watch.

Does it have good prepping tips?

Yes it does, a lot actually but as the story shows a lot of character growth it also shows quite a few mistakes, for example: they rely a lot on guns and scavenging for canned food in the first season or two but by the latter seasons they understand the importance of production and have learned to rely on hand to hand combat weapons.

The 100

Cover image for The 100

The 100 is an odd show, it seems targeted at teenagers and young adults but even so, it’s a pretty good show. The world ended in a nuclear war 100 years ago it seems that the only survivors are the people who were living on a space station at the time of the disaster. Now, their descendants are sending 100 young offenders down to the planet to see if the Earth is ready to support human life.

Does it have good prepping tips?

It has a few ideas but it’s largely just nonsense, like in many other shows of this ilk you see people drinking water directly out of streams and making countless other mistakes. This is pure entertainment with pretty much zero education.

Life after people

Cover image for Life After People

Ok this one isn’t a story, it’s a dramatic over-the-top American documentary series but it’s one of my guilty pleasures. The first episode is actually a feature-length documentary, which the later series is based upon.

Does it have good prepping tips?

Yeah, sort of! So there are no people in the show at all (that’s kinda the point), however it shows you what various parts of the world will look like a few days to a few thousand years after people have stopped maintaining it. This information can be useful to know in a full-blown apocalypse.

Survivors

Cover image for Survivors

In a similar plot to ‘The Stand’ by Stephen King (but without the supernatural stuff), the majority of the human population is wiped out by a killer virus. The survivors must team up to live in their new world. Bonus points for having Max Beesley play a villain.

Does it have good prepping tips?

Tons! It’s also set in the UK so that’s a great bonus, it does focus a lot on the scavenging side of things though so its more useful for short-term WROL scenarios and not end of the world stuff.

Revolution

Cover image for Revolution

Revolution is the story of the ultimate power cut, for some undisclosed reason, everything electrical in the world has suddenly stopped working. The show does tell us a bit about what happens immediately after the disaster but most of the show takes please in the world that exists 15 years after the power cut.

Does it have good prepping tips?

Yeah some but remember that nearly all the ‘after the fall’ stuff takes place about 15 years later so again, it focuses more on long-term survival. Plus they don’t spend much time on the survival part, they are too busy shooting each other.

Lost

Cover image for Lost

The survivors of a plane crash must learn to live together on a mysterious island. That’s about as much of the plot as I can tell you without a) spoilers and b) having to type an entire article just to explain it.

Does it have good prepping tips?

Yes there is some stuff there but most of Lost is just magic and pseudo-science and even after years on the island they all have perfect hair – it’s a fun show to watch but don’t treat it as a bible.

Movies

The Postman

Cover image for The Postman

Decades after an undisclosed disaster (although nuclear war is hinted at) a travelling performer finds a dead postal worker in an old pre-disaster post wagon. He takes the undelivered letters and the uniform and starts delivering them.

Does it have good prepping tips?

A few, yeah but not many. Plus it’s set a long time after the fall so many of the tips wouldn’t be that useful to a prepper at first.

The Road

Cover image for The Road

Warning: This film is brutal and heart-wrenching, it’s an incredible film and I highly recommend you watch it even if you’re not a prepper but it’s far, far from a happy film and it pulls no punches.

An undisclosed disaster has ended the world. This isn’t a ‘how will society bounce back’ end of the world scenario but a ‘sooner or later, everyone will be dead’ scenario. In this world a man and his young son must try to survive for as long as possible.

Does it have good prepping tips?

Yeah it does. In fact it’s the first movie I did a movie breakdown for. You can check it out here!

Z for Zacharia

Cover art for Z for Zacharia

A nuclear disaster has devastated America, leaving most of it a radioactive wasteland. A survivor who is lucky enough to live on a farm in one of the few non-radioactive areas has lived alone for some time until she meets John, a survivor who has spent a lot of time trying to survive on the road living in the radiation.

Does it have good prepping tips?

Yep, it’s not packed with them but there are some pretty decent tips in there.

The Book of Eli

Cover art for The Book of Eli

This is another post-nuclear world and revolves around Eli, a wasteland wanderer who is by god to deliver a sacred book to somewhere in America.

Much of it is silly and the main character’s abilities are unlikely to say the least but the plot is interesting and it shows a good possible scenario for a post-apocalyptic world.

Does it have good prepping tips?

Yes and no, it does have a few of the basics (water is important, hygiene is important etc…) it kind of adds a layer of farcical stuff to it. By all means watch it as it’s a great movie but take any tips it gives you with a pinch of salt.

When the wind blows

Cover art for When The Wind Blows

An old English couple who lived through WWII but were young enough to have romanticized memories of it learn that a third world war is about to break out. They follow the pamphlets given to them from the government on how to survive but have no idea of the severity or reality of surviving a nuclear attack.

Does it have good prepping tips?

Not really, no. The point of the film is actually to show people how poor a lot of the official advice of the time actually was and made it painfully obvious that a lot of the ‘preps’ the government wanted you to do were actually designed to make it easier for them to collect your body at a later date.

Threads

Cover art for Threads

Apologies for the quality of the image here, the early 80’s TV of the UK wasn’t known for its high production values.

Another early 80’s NPT propaganda film, ‘Threads’ tells the story of a small group of people living in Sheffield in the weeks leading up to and up to a few years after a nuclear war devastates the country. It is phenomenally over-the-top and incredibly bleak but it also paints what is apparently a realistic picture of what it would be like to be close to ground zero of a nuclear attack.

Does it have good prepping tips?

Not really, it’s from the same era as ‘When the wind blows’ and once again it has been designed to scare everyone into getting behind the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty. Think of it more of a cautionary tale and not a guide on how to survive.

Interstellar

Cover art for Interstellar

Not many people thing of this as a post apocalypse movie but that’s exactly what it is, an unnamed blight has killed off most of the crops on the planet and for decades, the world has been in the grip of a massive dust bowl. The main character, Cooper must travel to another solar system to find a new planet for the human race to live on.

Does it have good prepping tips?

Nah. The apocalypse itself happened a long time ago and we are seeing the aftermath, they still have fuel and electricity, they have just run out of food, a problem mitigated a little by a massive die-off of the population. The closest we see to prepping tips here is when Cooper scavenged parts from an old drone to repurpose them to work on his farm.

The Stand

Cover art for The Stand

OK this one is a bit of a cheat as I think the film was utterly terrible, however the Stephen King book it is based on is absolutely superb so I highly recommend checking that out. If you really need to watch a film version and have a bit of patience, a remake is in the works and apparently stars Matthew McConaughey

The plot of the film/book is that an incredibly deadly plague has wiped all most of humanity, there are literally a few stragglers left in the world (maybe a few million, worldwide. Tops!) and it’s about the survivors coming together to face a new threat.

Does it have good prepping tips?

A few but nothing to write home about, most of the survivors don’t seem to really seem all that affected (from a survival point of view) by the disaster.

Are there any I’ve missed? If so add them in the comments and it might make it into a future update.