Cosmic Horror Story / Live-Action TV

• Aftermath: After humanity vanishes, most signs of its civilization disappear within a few centuries' time, the remainder after the next ice age. Other lifeforms move on and adapt. Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old, the universe three times that length of time; humanity's whole existence was just the blink of an eye.
• Angel is closer to Lovecraft Lite for most of its run but lurches into Cosmic Horror in its final season, what with the protagonists wrestling with the futility of their battles and the certain knowledge that everything they've done has either been a minor inconvenience to The Senior Partners, or helped their schemes. The final scene of the series is the surviving characters preparing to fight a massive army of demons, with the implication that they will either die having achieved nothing, or fight for all eternity.
• Black Mirror:
  • "White Christmas" could be considered one, working with Year Inside, Hour Outside.
  • "USS Callister" mixes this with a Deconstruction of Video Game Cruelty Potential — if the video game characters are able to pass the Turing test^note (in this case, they are the sentient digital clones of people who work in the player's office, and he abuses them for catharsis) and being tormented every day by a psychopathic player with practically unlimited power, then there is no denying this is the kind of story they live in.
• Chernobyl can almost be considered an actual Real Life version of a Cosmic Horror Story. The show is a bleak five-episode miniseries dramatizing the worst nuclear accident in history, and a major theme is the lack of control humans have over the unimaginably powerful and destructive forces of nuclear energy and radiation. Characters scramble to try and contain the accident as it threatens to bring about the deaths of millions of people in Europe while incomprehensible horrors erupt around them and kill hundreds, if not thousands of their comrades. The environment is left forever altered, with the half-life of some of the dangerous elements released by the accident being tens of thousands of years long. The exposed reactor core is constantly only ever shown hidden by smoke and unnatural light, and is treated by the series as if it were some kind of angry, malevolent yet unknowable Eldritch Abomination corrupting and twisting the world around it by its mere presence. If you were to go over the criteria atop this page, the only one you would firmly be able to answer 'no' to is the literal indescribable nature of the disaster.
  • Though it is subverted in the final episode, which revolves around the hearings that were held to determine how and why the disaster actually occurred, and which — while no less horrifying — are depicted less as a Cosmic Horror and more as a standard disaster story. It also features some signs of life returning, or at least carrying on, despite the devastation.
  Legasov: You are dealing with something that has never occurred on this planet before.
• Doctor Who:
  • The series heavily implies that the Last Great Time War became this by the end. Entire civilizations were rendered extinct or simply wiped from existence, armies of Eldritch Abominations were created and used as weapons, the Daleks became deranged and maniacal even by their standards, the Time Lords were perfectly willing to destroy time in an attempt to save their own skins, and the Doctor — usually a Badass Pacifist who tries to find a solution that won't kill anyone — was so horrified that he (tried to) kill off everyone involved just to contain it.
  • There's also the backstory of the Toclafane, who turn out to be the last remnants of humanity, having discovered that there was no escape from the entropy consuming all existence, and became some kind of terrifying hive mind race of sociopaths in order to hang on just a little longer. It's shown that merely seeing where the universe ends up is enough to turn the Master's human wife into a Straw Nihilist.
  • Multiple episodes have shown that if it weren't for the Doctor, the entire Whoniverse would amount to one giant cosmic horror story.
• Farscape borders on this at times. While the universe as a whole isn't overtly threatened by any Eldritch Abomination, it does show mankind's insignificance in a vast cosmos that is almost entirely unaware of its existence; when it is discovered, the only safe option is to deliberately cut Earth off from the rest of the galaxy.^note This is somewhat muddled by one of the most populous and powerful races being a genetically modified Human Subspecies; it's only Earth and its people that's a meaningless backwater. In the event that it hadn't, arguably the most optimistic possible future for human race was to be colonized by the Scarran Imperium and used for casual sex by Scarran officers on shore leave, the next generation of humans being almost entirely comprised of Scarran hybrids. For good measure, the Uncharted Territories alone are populated by countless varieties of nightmarish creatures and impossible beings, most of them extremely hostile or at the very least antagonistic towards other races. Worse still, the nearest things to gods in this setting (be they Sufficiently Advanced Aliens or truly godlike Energy Beings) are amoral and uninterested in anything outside their sphere of influence at best; at worst, they're murderous kill-crazy bastards who are actually empowered by mass-slaughter. Tellingly enough, Crichton's final victory was only possible thanks to the sponsorship of one of the least selfish group of entities from beyond reality. This gets a flat-out parody in one episode, in which the eldritch tentacled horror from beyond space and time they encounter is essentially just trying to help them get their car out of a ditch.
• The Good Place is a surprising but undeniable example. Every single person who has ever lived for the past five centuries has gone to Hell. Why? Because the beings responsible for determining who goes where have paid so little attention to the world that they haven't realized that their system is wildly out of date. Humanity isn't being condemned for kicks or any personal reason — they're being sent to Hell because the beings in charge don't give a damn. The protagonists have to force them to see what's going on in order to correct this injustice. Then they have to convince them to try and fix the system instead of hitting a literal Reset Button and hoping humanity turns out better next time.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kamen Rider Build turns into one of these in the second half when it's revealed that Blood Stalk is an alien lifeform that at full power has the ability to create black holes with but a thought and has destroyed countless civilizations. The only reason why he didn't destroy Earth immediately after reaching such power levels (aside from the fact that he's a sociopath who loves seeing the Puny Earthlings struggle) is because he wants to unlock Faster-Than-Light Travel, which would allow him to destroy the universe in record time.
  • Earlier than that, we had Kamen Rider Gaim. Which, incidentally, was written by the same person who gave us Puella Magi Madoka Magica from the Anime and Manga subpage. Partway through, the mysterious forest dimension of Helheim is revealed to be the ruined remnants of an alien world that was consumed by Helheim itself, poisoning the soil for all but its own plants. Plants that bear Helheim's hypnotically delicious fruit, which transforms anyone or anything that eats them into a monstrous Inves, which in turn results in Death of Personality for the eater. Worse is that Helheim is spreading from planet to planet, and its infestation of Earth gets worse as time rolls on. Takatora states that Earth only has about ten years before Helheim swallows it completely.
• Sapphire and Steel takes place in a universe threatened by formless evils. The (presumably) non-human "Elements" Steel and occasionally even the more sympathetic Sapphire, can on occasion seem alien themselves.
• Supernatural: As more and more of the higher powers and cosmic entities get introduced, this theme starts getting played to more effect. It becomes clear just how much of an Insignificant Little Blue Planet is and how easily it could get wiped out by next Tuesday. Death puts it the best.
  Death: This is one little planet in one tiny solar system in a galaxy that's barely out of its diapers. I'm old, Dean. Very old. So I invite you to contemplate how insignificant I find you.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • In "And When the Sky Was Opened", two astronauts, Forbes and Gart, fly a prototype X-20 aircraft into space, then disappear from radar for 24 hours, only to crash in the Mojave desert. They all seem to be fine, aside from the fact that there were three of them. Forbes went with the other member of their crew, Harrington, to a bar, where he inexplicably disappeared and nobody but Forbes seems to remember him. As Forbes goes looking around for some evidence of what happened, he starts to speculate that maybe someone or something made a mistake, and their flight wasn't meant to return to earth. By the end, he, Gart, and the X-20 all vanish as well. Nobody knows why, and nobody ever will.
  • "It's a Good Life", an episode based off of a short story of the same name by Jerome Bixby, is a crowning example. The premise of the episode is that the town of Peaksville, Ohio is under the rule of Anthony Fremont, a six-year-old with near god-like mental and telepathic powers. Everyone in the whole town has to think happy thoughts and say nice, positive things to him or else he snaps at them by mutating them (as he does in the case of Dan Hollis, turning him into a jack-in-the-box), maiming them, or sending them to a place known only as "the Cornfield" (also in the case of Dan Hollis). No one is safe in the entire town- not even his own family. Oh, and Peaksville, Ohio isn't even on Earth anymore (or even in this universe for that matter) all thanks to that terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad boy Anthony. There's a special place in hell for this god-forsaken brat!
• Twin Peaks:
  • Especially in the second season, with the gradual reveal that under a quiet and reasonably cheerful town it turns out there are mysterious otherworldly beings, including one who delights in possessing people's bodies and committing brutal murders, though he is found and apparently defeated until he possesses Cooper's body in the season finale. Then, of course, there's the Black Lodge.
  • The Return goes way beyond that, as is implied in the finale that despite whatever leaps the main character has achieved in understanding such otherworldly phenomena, true understanding is beyond any human grasp or control.

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