Survivors (Seasons 1–2)

Survivors (2021) is a Russian post-apocalyptic sci-fi series you can watch online on iFILM, built on a brutally simple nightmare. Civilization has collapsed, and a virus has attacked the part of the brain that governs sleep. Drift off, and you won't surface again on your own — within a couple of hours sleep slides into a coma, and the coma into death.

There is only one way to live: someone beside you has to force you awake. You'd think shared catastrophe would bind the survivors together. It doesn't. Armed gangs prowl the scorched roads hunting fuel and food, packs of feral dogs circle the edges of town, and every nap becomes a bet on another person's conscience. At the center sits a handful of people trying to keep their loved ones — and their own minds — intact. Alexey Filimonov, Daria Savelyeva, Anna Slyu and Fyodor Lavrov head the cast.

Director Andrei Proshkin skips the disaster spectacle and goes small and personal, asking what's left of a person once even the right to sleep is taken away. Fans of bleak survival fiction in the vein of The Walking Dead — minus the zombies — will find their footing fast. Stream Survivors (2021) online on iFILM.