I read this book recently: https://www.amazon.com/Anomaly-Novel-Herv%C3%A9-Tellier/dp/1... - don't want to give away too much (that's why I'm not linking to the Wikipedia article), but it fits the genre you are proposing - except spanning the entire world, not just a town.

Maybe you can find something on this list, https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/pre-apocalyptic

I looked at a few books on this list, but not every book seems to really be about pre-apocalypse. Pre-Apocalyptic fictions sounds like literary edging :D

Sounds like the movies "Don't look up" and "Melancholia"

Not much really happens, all everybody knows is that doom is imminent. The movies are mainly about how the different characters handle this situation.

That said, I am still waiting for a movie that just suddenly ends with a car crash where the main protagonist dies, fully unrelated to the story.

A bit reminiscent of the ending of No Country for Old Men, although you never find out if he actually dies.

The last episode of Downton Abbey, Season 3 is reasonably close to that.

That was my hope for Fear the Walking Dead, a show about society collapses under a zombie apocalypse. Instead we got some hints in a pre-zombie LA, went straight to a cordoned of quarantine zone and a time jump to "now the world, except your little suburb, went to hell". Seems writing convincing stories about why everything would collapse is a lot harder than stories set after an assumed collapse.

“The Doomsday Book” by Connie Willis kind of has that feeling for a while. I couldn’t really get into it, though; it’s undeniably a well-written book, just not the kind of book I wanted to read.

On The Beach. So much doom I literally can’t finish it. Ok it’s post-apocalyptic but reads like it’s pre-apocalyptic.