Shows Like War of the Worlds
If you loved War of the Worlds's Drama and Action & Adventure storytelling, these series deliver a similar experience — chosen for tone, narrative quality, and viewer satisfaction. Each includes where to stream it now.
★ Top Picks
The New Avengers
The New Avengers is a British secret agent fantasy adventure television series broadcast during 1976 and 1977. It is a sequel to the 1960s series The Avengers and was developed by Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens. A joint United Kingdom-France-Canada production, the show picks up the adventures of John Steed and his team of Avengers fighting evil plots and world domination. Whereas in the original series Steed had almost always been partnered with a woman, in the new series he had two partners: Mike Gambit, a top agent, crack marksman and trained martial artist, and Purdey, a former trainee with The Royal Ballet who was an amalgam of many of the best talents from Steed's previous female partners.
Chosen
Ian Mitchell is a lawyer and father who one day receives a box containing a gun and a picture of a stranger, along with instructions to kill the pictured person. He is subsequently attacked by another stranger, and discovers that he has been chosen by a mysterious organization known as The Watchers to participate in a lethal game.
The Terminal List
Navy SEAL Commander James Reece turns to vengeance as he investigates the mysterious forces behind the murder of his entire platoon. Free from the military’s command structure, Reece applies the lessons he’s learned from nearly two decades of warfare to hunt down the people responsible.
Black Sails
The pirate adventures of Captain Flint and his men twenty years prior to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic “Treasure Island.” Flint, the most brilliant and most feared pirate captain of his day, takes on a fast-talking young addition to his crew who goes by the name John Silver. Threatened with extinction on all sides, they fight for the survival of New Providence Island, the most notorious criminal haven of its day – a debauched paradise teeming with pirates, prostitutes, thieves and fortune seekers, a place defined by both its enlightened ideals and its stunning brutality.
El final del paraíso
In this new era, Catalina, now head of the DEA in Colombia, has a new challenge: to track down a criminal organization that is trafficking a new synthetic drug. What she ignores is that her daughter is part of the Cartel that traffics them and that Yésica, her worst enemy, is infiltrated in the DEA.
The Sweeney
Jack Regan, an unethical officer of the Flying Squad, uses unorthodox methods to pursue criminals with the help of his partner, George Carter.
The Day of the Jackal
An unrivalled and highly elusive lone assassin, the Jackal, makes his living carrying out hits for the highest fee. But following his latest kill, he meets his match in a tenacious British intelligence officer who starts to track down the Jackal in a thrilling cat-and-mouse chase across Europe, leaving destruction in its wake.
The Fugitive
Falsely accused of bombing a Los Angeles subway train by “tweet-now, confirm-later” journalism, blue collar worker Mike Ferro must prove his innocence by uncovering the real perpetrator, before the legendary cop heading the investigation can apprehend him.
More Shows Like War of the Worlds
Taken
The origin story of younger, hungrier, former Green Beret Bryan Mills as he deals with a personal tragedy that shakes his world. As he fights to overcome the incident and exact revenge, Mills is pulled into a career as a deadly CIA operative, a job that awakens his very particular, and very dangerous, set of skills.
El Conde: Amor y Honor
A wrongful conviction changes the life of Alejandro Gaitán and separates him from the woman he loves, Mariana Zambrano. After 17 years in jail, he becomes a count with the help of another prisoner and seeks revenge on those who turned on him.
Die Hart
Tired of being the comedic sidekick, Kevin Hart gets his wish when a famous director offers him his dream – to be a leading man action star – but there’s a catch: Kevin must first train at the world’s greatest action star school, run by a lunatic.
Scarecrow and Mrs. King
Scarecrow and Mrs. King is an American television series that aired from October 3, 1983, to May 28, 1987 on CBS. The show stars Kate Jackson and Bruce Boxleitner as divorced housewife Amanda King and top-level "Agency" operative Lee Stetson who begin a strange association, and eventual romance, after encountering one another in a train station.
Starsky & Hutch
Streetwise Detective David Starsky partners up with a more intellectual partner, Kenneth 'Hutch' Hutchinson, to protect citizens and patrol the streets of Bay City.
Walker
Cordell Walker, a widower and father of two with his own moral code, returns home to Austin after being undercover for two years, only to discover there's harder work to be done at home.
MacGruber
After rotting in prison for over a decade, America's ultimate hero and uber patriot MacGruber is finally released. His mission: to take down a mysterious villain from his past—Brigadier Commander Enos Queeth. With the entire world in the crosshairs, MacGruber must reassemble his old team in order to defeat the forces of evil.
Kung Fu
A quarter-life crisis causes a young Chinese-American woman to drop out of college and go on a life-changing journey to an isolated monastery in China. But when she returns to find her hometown overrun with crime and corruption, she uses her martial arts skills and Shaolin values to protect her community and bring criminals to justice…all while searching for the assassin who killed her Shaolin mentor and is now targeting her.
Mission: Impossible
Mission: Impossible is an American television series that chronicles the missions of a team of secret American government agents known as the Impossible Missions Force. The show is a revival of the 1966 TV series of the same name. The only actor to return for the series as a regular cast member was Peter Graves who played Jim Phelps, although two other cast members from the original series returned as guest stars. The only other regular cast member to return for every episode was the voice of "The Tape", Bob Johnson.
La Brea
An epic adventure begins when a massive sinkhole opens in the middle of Los Angeles, pulling hundreds of people and buildings into its depths. Those who fell in find themselves in a mysterious and dangerous primeval land, where they have no choice but to band together to survive. Meanwhile, the rest of the world desperately seeks to understand what happened. In the search for answers, one family torn apart by this disaster will have to unlock the secrets of this inexplicable event to find a way back to each other.
Expedition Unknown
The adventures of Josh Gates as he investigates unsolved iconic stories across the globe.
Bulletproof
Police duo Bishop and Pike are two best mates bonded by the same moral code, despite their differences. Packed full of humour, action and emotion, Bulletproof is about friendship, conspiracies and ghosts from the past.
Why These Shows Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with War of the Worlds (1988): Drama and Action & Adventure themes, similar pacing, and comparable production quality. NoBadPicks uses TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface series most likely to resonate with fans of War of the Worlds.
See full details for War of the Worlds (1988)