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Movies & TV

10th May 2023

Silo is the best new show on TV right now

Rory Cashin

Silo

Don’t sleep on this one.

How best to describe Silo? A megamix of ideas borrowed from movies like Blade Runner and The Hunger Games, from shows like Lost and Severance, from games like Fallout and Bioshock, but merged into something wholly unique and original.

Scratching the itch of a good, BIG mystery, the show is set in the distant future (or is it?), within the confines of an enormous living structure built entirely underground (or is it?), where the last remnants of humanity (or are they?) live their lives, as the outside world has become an unliveable toxic wasteland (or has it?… okay, we’ll stop doing that now).

We’re quickly introduced to the Silo’s sheriff, Holston (David Oyelowo – Selma, The Butler), his wife and genius IT worker Allison (Rashida Jones – Parks & Rec, The Social Network), her boss Bernard (Tim Robbins – The Shawshank Redemption, Mystic River), the sheriff’s deputy Marnes (Will Patton – Halloween, Armageddon), as well as the head of private security, Sims (Common – American Gangster, John Wick Chapter 2) and perhaps most importantly of all, Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson – Mission: Impossible, The Greatest Showman), an engineer who works deep in the pits of the silo.

Individually and together, they all begin to find evidence that something is terribly wrong within the gargantuan but still very claustrophobic confines of their world, especially since nobody has any knowledge about who built the silo, what actually caused the outside world to become so deadly, and why all records of humanity’s existence before the current generation were destroyed…

So we’ve got a mystery with lots of moving parts, an incredible and incredibly talented cast, with the show created by the guy who wrote the scripts for classic action movies Speed and (admittedly less classic) Broken Arrow, produced by the same team who are already providing us with one of the best shows of recent years, and directed by the Oscar-winning guy behind The Imitation Game and Headhunters. Oh, and the critics love it too:

The Guardian – “Silo can be read as a lot of things. But before all of that, it is a fantastically made story that embraces classic tropes and cliffhanger endings as enthusiastically as it does delicate characterisations and deferred gratifications. Dig in.”

Roger Ebert – “Silo has echoes of projects like Blade Runner, The Expanse, and even The Platform, but it also has its own confident voice, a complex storytelling tone more reminiscent of literature than traditional streaming dramas. One of the best of 2023 so far.”

The Playlist – “If a hard science-fiction mystery show is what you’ve been looking for, then Silo more than fits the bill. Ferguson’s Juliette is the full package, a hard-hitting hero with plenty of range to carry the dramatic parts with equal power. Not to be outdone is a fantastic supporting cast that makes even the briefest of appearances memorable.”

The first two episodes of Silo are available to watch on Apple TV+ right now, with new episodes arriving every Friday.

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Topics:

Apple,Silo,TV