Apple's stunning new SF show promises to be bleak and brilliant

Silo brings the dystopian sci-fi blockbuster book series to the small screen

Silo on Apple TV
(Image credit: Apple)

If you're looking for more post-apocalyptic bleakness after The Last of Us ends, Apple TV+ may have just the show for you. Based on the hugely popular books by Hugh Howey, Silo comes to the streaming service on 5 May. I've embedded the first teaser trailer below.

Silo is a mystery. 10,000 people are living together in an underground silo a mile below the surface of the Earth. Who made the silo? Nobody knows. Why are they in it? Nobody knows that either. What happens if you try to find out? Nothing good.

So naturally Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) tries to find out.

What is the secret of the silo?

If you're familiar with Hugh Howey's Wool and subsequent books, you'll already know: the Silo Trilogy – Wool, Shift and Dust – sold tons of copies to people who loved its dystopian SF. But at the outset all we know is that something horrible has happened, and that the one place you don't want to be is outside the silo. 

Apple TV+ has assembled quite the cast for its adaptation. Rebecca Ferguson appeared in The White Queen, Dune, Men In Black: International and two Mission: Impossible films, and she's joined here by Chinaza Uche (A Good Person), Avi Nash (The Walking Dead), Harriet Walker (The Crown, Call The Midwife, Law & Order: UK), Common (John Wick, Selma), Tim Robbins (where do I even start?) and Rashida Jones (The Office US, Parks and Recreation, The Social Network and more).

This looks like another big-budget Apple TV+ epic, and I'm hoping it's as good as the teaser trailer suggests. Apple TV+'s on something of a roll right now, and it's clearly investing heavily in original content rather than just throwing lots of stuff at the wall in the hope that something sticks. It may not be the biggest streaming service, but I think Apple TV+ is often the most interesting.

Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series. When she’s not scribbling, she’s the singer in Glaswegian rock band HAVR (havrmusic.com).