Apple TV’s dystopian hit Silo has always traded in existential dread, but its creators say the third season landed a little too close to home. The series, adapted from Hugh Howey’s novels that began in 2011, imagines 10,000 people sealed inside a colossal underground bunker after some unnamed catastrophe rendered the surface uninhabitable. Season 2’s finale finally cracked open the mystery, flashing back to a near-future Washington, DC, reeling from news that Iran had struck the United States with a dirty bomb.
Season 3, which premiered July 3 on Apple TV, leans hard into that backstory, opening with a US counterattack on Iran. The problem, as showrunner Graham Yost tells it, is that reality kept catching up to the script.
Fiction outrunning the writers
“We had no control over when [season 3] was going to come out, that it would be during a war with Iran, but in the books there was talk of a mission to Iran, so we just kept that in,” Yost explained. The eerie coincidences didn’t stop at the premise. “One weird thing is we named the operation Righteous Hammer, and the bombing mission last June was called Midnight Hammer. It’s like, Well great. Now we’ve got to change that. That sounds a little too flip, and I apologize for that. It’s war, and it’s tough.”
Star and executive producer Rebecca Ferguson admitted the team wrestled with whether to rewrite. “Do we change our storyline because of the situation in the world because it’s affecting everyone?” she said.
A show that saw it coming
For Ashley Zukerman, who joins the cast this season as Congressman Daniel Keene, that uncanny prescience was part of the draw. “The writers and Hugh Howey were just very on the pulse of what’s going on in the world in a way that I wasn’t,” he said. “AI is mentioned in our show before the AI boom that happened. It just made it feel like the writers really knew what they were talking about.”
As the season unfolds, Silo follows Howey’s source material into more speculative territory, layering in bigger sci-fi ideas that pull the story away from ripped-from-the-headlines conflict. But Zukerman argues the emotional core stays grounded in the here and now.
“The show seemed to just ask all the same questions that I ask of the world,” he said. “I think the show is ultimately just about living in dark times and how you keep the light alive in yourself and in each other. That’s what’s beautiful about it. I think it’s just a very kind show. Everyone is just really trying to do their best. You can understand everyone’s point of view.”
It’s a rare trick for a bleak sci-fi thriller: a story about the end of the world that still finds room for decency. Season 3 of Silo is streaming now on Apple TV.
