The Mike Flanagan Carrie series arrives with eight episodes, a Vancouver shoot wrapped between June and October 2025, and the weight of Stephen King’s most enduringly relevant novel behind it. If you want something to watch while you wait, or something to pair with it once it lands, the shows below cover the same bruising terrain (bullying, power, revenge, and the specific misery of being young and powerless) from angles that range from South Korean slow-burn to Jordanian private-school drama to a murderous doll in small-town America.
What We Know About the Mike Flanagan Carrie Series
According to Variety, the project was first reported to be in development in October 2024, before Amazon officially greenlit it in April 2025. Eight episodes, with principal photography completed in Vancouver, Canada, across roughly five months in the second half of 2025, per Wikipedia. Flanagan has form as King’s most capable modern-day adapter, so expectations are reasonable. In the meantime, here’s where to turn.
Revenge, Survival and High School Hell: The Best Shows Like Carrie
The Glory (2022) is the most direct companion piece on this list. Song Hye-kyo plays Moon Dong-eun, a teacher whose adult life has been consumed by post-traumatic stress after school bullies (protected by wealthy parents) faced zero consequences for sustained, serious violence. Her revenge is cold, patient, and structural rather than supernatural. Stream it on Netflix.
I Am Not Okay With This (2020) stars Sophia Lillis as Sydney Novak, a 17-year-old whose grief, small-town claustrophobia and emotional overload gradually unlock abilities she cannot control. Lillis came straight from playing Beverly Marsh in the It films, so the King adjacency is baked in. The tone leans dark comedy rather than horror, but there are moments that would feel at home in Carrie’s third act. Also on Netflix.
The Wilds (2020–2022) positions its teenage-girls-stranded-on-an-island premise as a mystery thriller: the plane crash was engineered, the survival situation is a social experiment, and the show is attentive to how young women are made to compete against each other long before any island is involved. Stream it on Prime Video.
The Midnight Club (2022) is arguably the least-discussed of Flanagan’s Netflix run. Based on a YA novel by Christopher Pike, it follows eight terminally ill young patients at a hospice whose nightly ritual involves sharing horror stories and a collective promise to contact each other from beyond the grave. Heather Langenkamp, of A Nightmare on Elm Street, plays the hospice’s secretive doctor. Funny, spooky, and genuinely moving.
The Society (2019) takes a Lord of the Flies approach, all the adults in a small enclave vanish, a dense forest seals the teenagers inside, and they set about rebuilding exactly the oppressive social hierarchies they were already living under. Kathryn Newton leads the ensemble. Netflix.
Stranger Things (2016–2025) needs no introduction, but the Carrie parallel holds up: a young woman with telekinetic abilities, a repressive upbringing, and adults who are at best useless and at worst actively dangerous. Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven and Carrie White would, as the original article puts it, recognise each other’s trials. The tones diverge sharply (retro government-conspiracy adventure versus high school introspection) but the emotional core is the same. Netflix.
It: Welcome to Derry (2025–) is the other obvious King connection. Set in the 1960s, the prequel traces Pennywise’s previous visit to Derry through the children who encountered him, each carrying their own specific family and social wounds that the clown is expert at exploiting. Bill Skarsgård returns. Stream it on Max.
Teach You a Lesson (2026–) is the most wish-fulfilment entry: a South Korean webtoon adaptation in which a government bureau called the Educational Rights Protection Bureau is tasked with reforming schools by any means necessary. Their first case involves a student who died by suicide and a bully shielded by a prominent politician father. Described accurately as Avengers: High School energy. Netflix.
AlRawabi School for Girls (2021–2024) is a Jordanian private-school drama in which the bullied Mariam and a couple of outcast allies launch a revenge plot that escalates badly. The show confronts patriarchy head-on without letting any of its characters off the hook, Mariam’s methods end up exploiting the same cultural forces she opposes. Sharp, soapy, morally complicated. Netflix.
Chucky (2021–2024) closes things out on Peacock and Prime Video. Zackary Arthur plays Jake Wheeler, a queer teen dealing with bullying at school and an abusive home life who picks up a certain doll at a garage sale. The violence that follows functions, thematically, like an externalised version of Carrie’s abilities: forces a teenager can neither fully control nor entirely disown.
