If there’s one person out there who knows more than most about crafting genre fiction that lives long in the memory, Stephen King has to be designated one of the highest spots on the list. He’s also got a habit of recommending film and television projects to his millions of followers on social media, so maybe it’s time for everyone to sit up and take notice of Silo.
That’s not to say the episodic dystopian epic based on the Wool series of novels by Hugh Howley is some sort of underrated gem that nobody’s ever heard of, but it still hasn’t been finding the size of audience it truly deserves by way of its existence as an Apple TV original. If it aired on something like Netflix, Prime Video, or Max it might be a bigger deal, but it hasn’t quite cracked the mainstream yet.
Anchored by a phenomenal performance by Rebecca Ferguson, bolstered by a starry cast including Rashida Jones, David Oyelowo, Common, and countless more besides, and held together by a stellar Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 87 percent, King is absolutely right in his assessment of the show.
Set in a future where a community dwells inside a gigantic silo that spans hundreds of stories, 10,000 souls are bound by the rules and regulations they’ve been conditioned to believe guarantee their safety. Of course, Ferguson’s engineer Juliette Nichols doesn’t quite buy into the hype, and she inevitably discovers conspiratorial secrets that could rock the enclosed society to its very core.
Apple’s streaming originals don’t quite capture the zeitgeist in the same way many of its competitors originals do, but Silo is one that’s definitely worth seeking out, even without the Stephen King seal of approval.