Apocalypse & Survival

Apocalypse is the genre a vertical platform can sell with no recognisable face at all: the audience brings its own fear of empty roads, drowned towns and the number of days left on a water gauge. It is also the cheapest action genre to draw, because the biggest set pieces on earth cost nothing to paint – a dead highway, a cut bridge, a horizon. The cost that actually bites is repetition: audiences forgive a small palette and never forgive a background they recognise three episodes running, so the whole draw budget goes into made backgrounds rather than moving parts.