GOING UNDERGROUND
THE WOOL TRILOGY COMES TO SCREENS IN SUBTERRANEAN SERIES SILO
WORDS: BRYAN CAIRNS
STOCK ART: GETTY
I MAGINE EVERYTHING YOU HOLD true turned out to be one gigantic lie. That’s the conundrum that threatens to devour the last 10,000 humans on Earth in upcoming TV series Silo.
Based on Hugh Howey’s bestselling trilogy of Wool novels, the dystopian drama takes place after a global event wipes out most of the population. In the aftermath, a community of survivors settles into a massive bunker that stretches downwards beneath the planet’s surface. The structure protects people from the toxic atmosphere… or so they believe. What hooked showrunner Graham Yost (Justified, Speed), however, wasn’t the post-apocalyptic landscape, but the puzzles woven into the narrative.
“What grabbed me about the story is, ‘Oh wow. This is a mystery. Who built the silo? When? Why? What’s going on?’” Yost tells SFX. “Then it’s the whole question of, ‘Is it deadly outside? What’s going on?’
Rashida Jones and David Oyelowo get handsy.
Jones as Allison: you’ll catch flies like that.
The rapper Common (Lonnie Rashid Lynn) is Sims.
Rebecca Ferguson as Juliette: mysteries.
Bernard (Tim Robbins): seems nice enough.
“And it wasn’t people with stuff wrapped around them, going through deserted terrains and having to shoot wolves and fight each other for food,” he continues. “For me, it was like, ‘They dress like us. They talk like us. They complain about their boss like us. They complain about their husbands and wives like us. They do their jobs. They raise their kids, but they are living in a silo. They don’t know when it was built or why.’ I like that the dystopian element was not shoved in your face. We say it’s like East Germany in 1983; it is a fairly soft dictatorship, at least it seems so. There is that sense that people are watching and something is going on.”