Consume This Content: 2 Disaster Shows and a Movie to Fill the ‘Walking Dead’ Sized Hole in Our Lives

Consume This Content: Stuff you should watch, read or listen too. More recommendations here.

The time between the end of one season of The Walking Dead and the start of the next can feel like an eternity. We have to go all the way until October. Sure we have the companion series in August. But that's still, um, more then a week away. If you, like me, need a disaster fix I'm here to help with some content to consume.

What I like about these two shows and a move is that they are about the disaster and the response to the disaster. They don't use the disaster as a backdrop for a soap opera.

• Watch the First Trailer for 'Fear the Walking Dead' 

First up is the show The Last Ship. I was introduced to this show by a promo during @Midnight on Hulu. It's a TNT original series, season two is coming later this summer. I watched the first season over a weekend and was hooked quickly. There's only 10 episodes in the first season, so the story is kept nice and tight.

The show takes place mainly on the USS Nathan James, a naval destroyer. The ship is in the Arctic conducting top secret tests, they are on radio silence and out of contact with anyone for a few months. After the tests are completed they make contact and find that the world has been ravaged by a super virus, killing billions of people.

I won't get into to much of the plot, but over the course of the season the crew works to find fuel for the ship, water for the people and a vaccine for the world.

Speaking of a world destroyed by a virus, another show to watch is Survivors. It's a show from the BBC available on Netflix and Hulu. Once again we have a virus that kills billions of people. The show takes place in England and follows a group of survivors that come together after the world crashes.

There are two seasons of eight episodes each, so again the story is kept tight without a lot of pointless side stories.

Finally, to complete our virus-apolzoa watch the move Contagion. This 2011 Steven Soderbergh movie is a tense drams about a deadly super-flu that spreads around the globe. The move follows several people affected by the flu, from a family man played by Matt Damon, to a CDC field worker played by Kate Winslet, to the doctors working to find a vaccine.

What makes this film so fantastic is that it is not fantastical. The drama comes from exploring what it would really be like in a pandemic situation. The world doesn't collapse into Mad Max. Some things fall apart, people try to rise to the challenge, some fail some triumph. Soderbergh crafts an exceptional, and scary, adventure of science and social dynamics.