Colony (2016–2018) does something most alien-invasion stories refuse to do: it keeps the aliens almost entirely offscreen and makes the humans the horror. Carlton Cuse and Ryan J. Kellam set their show inside a walled Los Angeles where a puppet government of human collaborators enforces alien rule, and they ask a question that stings because it has no clean answer: what would you do to keep your children alive? Josh Holloway's Will Bowman is a former Special Forces soldier turned reluctant informant; Sarah Wayne Callies's Katie runs a resistance cell out of a bar. They are on opposite sides of the same war, living under the same roof, lying to each other every night. That tension between intimate domestic life and systemic totalitarian pressure is the engine fans chase. The show borrows from occupied-France history, Cold War paranoia, and the best of prestige cable drama to make a resistance story that is, above all, a marriage story. If that knot of loyalty, complicity, and survival pulls at you, every recommendation below follows the same thread.
Occupied and Complicit: TV That Gets the Collaboration Dilemma Right
Series where the enemy is already inside the gates and the moral calculus is never comfortable
Alien Occupation on Film: Resistance and Ruin
Movies that locate the real drama inside the human response to an overwhelming outside force
The Literature of Occupation: Novels That Burn Slow
Books that put ordinary people inside totalitarian systems and show the cost of every small surrender
Games Where You Choose Who to Protect
Survival and resistance games that force the same impossible family-or-cause trade-offs Colony runs on
The Aliens Are Almost Beside the Point
Colony's Hosts are terrifying precisely because we see so little of them. The walls, the drones, the Renditions: these act as a constant pressure, not a spectacle. The show understands that totalitarianism functions through bureaucracy and informants, not monsters in the street. That restraint is why Captive State and District 9 resonate with Colony fans more than Independence Day ever will: they keep the threat abstract and put the human machinery of collaboration front and center.
Occupied Is the Underrated Twin You Missed
Norway's Occupied (NRK/Netflix, 2015) is the closest television came to Colony's specific flavor. A soft-authoritarian takeover of a democratic country, a protagonist who collaborates for plausible reasons, and a marriage put under unbearable strain: the parallels are structural, not accidental. Both shows are methodical rather than action-driven, and both make the case that the most interesting resistance is the kind that happens at a dinner table. Occupied ran three seasons, and its geopolitical texture (the EU, Russia, energy politics) gives it a grounded bite Colony lacked.
This War of Mine Is Colony as a Game, Completely
11 bit studios' This War of Mine (2014) is the only game that captures Colony's moral register exactly. You manage a group of civilians sheltering in a bombed-out building, making decisions every night: scavenge and risk your people, steal from the old woman across the street, trade medicine for food. There are no soldiers and no power fantasies. The game's grayscale art and its insistence on recording every death in a diary feel like the show's ethos compressed into a few hours of quiet misery. It is not entertainment in any conventional sense; it is a mood.
Station Eleven Shows What Colony Was Building Toward
Colony was cancelled before it could complete its arc, and the third season's compressed ending left fans with a sense of a larger design they never saw. Station Eleven (the HBO Max series, 2021) is a useful consolation: it is also a survival story told through fractured families and time jumps, and it has the same conviction that culture, loyalty, and human connection are what make survival worth attempting. Both works resist the cynicism that usually curdles post-apocalyptic storytelling.
The walls keep them in. The drones watch from above. And yet the most dangerous thing in Los Angeles is still another person who knows your secret.Colony, Season 1
Occupation Fiction: A Genre History
- 1949Orwell publishes the foundational text of surveillance-state fiction
- 1985Atwood imagines a theocratic takeover of the United States from the inside The Handmaid's Tale
- 1962Philip K. Dick asks what American life looks like under Axis occupation The Man in the High Castle
- 2005Battlestar Galactica's New Caprica arc reframes occupation as a war-on-terror allegory Battlestar Galactica
- 2009District 9 arrives and relocates the alien-occupation story to Johannesburg, with apartheid as its subtext District 9
- 2014This War of Mine makes civilian survival under siege into a game with no safe exits This War of Mine
- 2015Norway's Occupied imagines a near-future soft takeover with chilling plausibility Occupied
- 2016Colony premieres on USA Network: occupation as domestic drama, the collaborator as protagonist Colony
- 2016Arrival reframes first contact as a question of trust and time rather than war Arrival
- 2019Captive State depicts Chicago a decade into alien rule, focusing entirely on the human quisling class Captive State
- 2021Station Eleven becomes the prestige heir to Colony's fractured-families-after-collapse vision Station Eleven