Silo is such a complex show that even its showrunner gets anxious about errors. While filming the final seasons of the Apple TV+ sci-fi thriller, Graham Yost recalls two incidents where he fumbled details: once when an actor realized that a line they were about to shoot had already taken place, and another involving the Japanese localization team pointing out that a subtitle didn’t match what was happening on screen. In both cases, the issue was eventually fixed, but Yost’s reaction was the same: “Oh shit, you’re right.”
Keeping everything straight is one of the biggest challenges of working on a series this intricate, and as Silo enters its final two seasons, the stakes have only grown higher. Fortunately, Yost has a team working alongside him to catch those mistakes. “It’s a lot to keep track of, but everyone pitches in,” he says, “and I love that sense of collaboration.”
Season 3 of Silo begins streaming on July 3rd, and it expands the story’s scope considerably. The series follows the lives of the residents of a massive underground bunker centuries after an unknown disaster. The silo is home to 10,000 people living in a vertical city, divided into layers that each have their own jobs and cultures — from the mines at the bottom to the government at the top. The only way to navigate the silo is via an enormous spiral staircase that runs from top to bottom, creating a deeply physical form of class division.
Initially, it seemed the residents were the last remnants of humanity living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But over the course of the first two seasons, it became clear that they lived in just one silo among many, each housing their own communities while isolated from one another. Season 3 introduces a new twist: showing how the world came to be this way in the first place, a story that begins in a world that looks much like our own.
The season 3 premiere constantly jumps between the dystopian future we’ve spent the last two seasons in and the present day, when the decisions were made that led to everyone being trapped inside underground bunkers. Things are already complicated because the show picks up from last season — protagonist, silo mayor, and reluctant revolutionary Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) has just become the first person to travel between silos and is now struggling with memory loss — and the multiple timelines only amplify that complexity.
“It’s a lot of pieces you’re trying to put together.”
The cast of Silo all have different ways of dealing with this challenge, which becomes even harder given that scenes are rarely shot in chronological order. For some, daily team meetings with directors are essential. “A lot of days, we’d start the day with story time, and the director would walk through where we’re at, where we just came from, what happens next,” explains Alexandria Riley, who plays newly promoted authority figure Camille Sims in the show. “It’s already a complicated story anyway, but then when shooting out of order, you get a little foggy.” Ferguson notes that the hair and makeup team is especially helpful in tracking the story, as they need to keep track of scars and burns for consistency. Every detail counts. “The small changes that you make have big ripple effects going forward,” she says.
“It’s a lot of pieces you’re trying to put together,” adds Chinaza Uche, who plays Camille’s husband Robert on the show. “It’s our job to know where we are, but thank God we had help, too. There are times when I’d have to talk to Alex about something just to be reminded.” The two actors even had separate rehearsals together to make sure they had everything down.
Others took a different approach. Jessica Henwick, for example, joined the main cast as the present-day investigative reporter Helen in season 3, and says “I didn’t read any scenes other than my own. Because I’m a fan of the show, I wanted to preserve that. I’ll watch season 3 as a fan and find out what happens. I don’t know what happens except in our storyline.” (Henwick is such a devoted fan that soon after she was cast, she had a single goal in mind: “I went to the set and explored the stairs.”)
One thing that doesn’t help much, however, is diving into the source material. Silo is based on a trilogy of books by author Hugh Howey; the first two seasons covered the first book, while the final two will wrap up the rest of the story. But much has changed in the adaptation because the TV show tries to both make Juliette a more central figure in the main storyline and update some plotlines to reflect present-day concerns like AI.
“I started reading the books and realized pretty quickly that wasn’t going to help, because the books are so different,” explains Ashley Zukerman, who plays a congressman in the present-day storyline. He says that keeping both the novels and the TV show in his mind at the same time wouldn’t be helpful and instead found that “reading all the scripts and then finding a way to forget what his character wouldn’t know was valuable.”
With two seasons to go, Silo is racing toward a conclusion as it tries to tie everything together. Yost says that four seasons was always the plan, so the process has been about figuring out how to fit everything into a specific number of episodes. But since the final two seasons were filmed back to back, it also means the Silo team is done worrying about keeping all of those complex plotlines straight. And as much as she says she’ll miss the experience of working on the show, there is one thing Ferguson is excited to be done with beyond memorizing storylines.
“I fucking hated running up and down those stairs,” she says.
