• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, December 2, 2024

Apocalyptic dramas have been in shorter supply in 2024 than in recent years, but that does not mean the fears that sometimes seem to grip the planet are no longer uppermost in the minds of many people.

Take the COVID-19 pandemic. As the years have advanced since the March 2020 start of the COVID-19 lockdowns and shelter-in-place scenarios, that whole experience is taking on a dreamlike quality.

Sometimes I ask myself: Did that really happen?

There have been plenty of apocalypse-pandemic TV dramas going back years, but a new one on MGM+ -- titled “Earth Abides” -- seems to be imagineered specifically around the recent pandemic because it imagines a similar scenario, but one with much more dire consequences.

In Episode 1, a character -- one of only three survivors we meet in the episode -- blames the devastation of the show’s pandemic on a grievous government misjudgment.

Her take is that, based on the criticism the government received in the last pandemic (by which we assume the one we all experienced in the real world), the powers-that-be decided that this time around they would not institute lockdowns or orders to take shelter until it became too late.

As a result, just about everyone on the planet Earth was killed, the vast majority in mere minutes -- in homes, cars, stores, offices and a thousand other everyday places.

As in other end-of-the-world dramas, the survivors merely survived through lucky, serendipitous circumstances.

That is how the lead character (Alexander Ludwig, pictured above) in “Earth Abides” survived. Bitten by a snake in the first moments of Episode 1, the man sucks out at least part of the venom, but nearly dies anyway.

But for three weeks, he drifts in and out of delirium in his home, which is isolated enough from any population center that he avoided the virus that killed everyone who was not so fortunate.

Upon awakening, he slowly learns that the world he knew was gone. Understandably, he is shocked and goes through various stages of grief.

Although “Earth Abides” sounds like “the Dude abides” from “The Big Lebowski,” the TV show and the movie are unrelated.

The show’s title seems to be adapted from a passage from Ecclesiastes: “One generation goeth, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever.”

In the show, the lead character -- whose name may be “Ish,” but that is unclear in Episode 1 -- is a geologist, and he begins to perceive his situation in terms of time.

He contemplates how nature will eventually take over the cities and towns until everything built by man will be consumed. With this in mind, he sets himself to the task of living in the present.

Stories of sole survivors have been a part of movies and TV shows for decades. Ready for another one? “Earth Abides” is a pretty good place to start.

“Earth Abides” is now streaming on MGM+.