Apple TV’s ‘Silo’ has spent three seasons steadily peeling back the layers of its enormous central mystery, and we recently had the chance to sit down with showrunner Graham Yost to chat about where the sci-fi drama has been as we approach the Season 3 finale and the fourth and final season.
Based on Hugh Howey’s bestselling novels, ‘Silo’ stars Rebecca Ferguson (Dune, Mission: Impossible) as Juliette Nichols, an engineer living inside a vast underground structure housing thousands of people. The inhabitants have been told the outside world is deadly, although, as anyone who has been following the series will know, things are considerably more complicated than that…
As the series has progressed, some of those long-running questions have begun to receive answers, which creates a different challenge for the writers. After all, building an intriguing mystery is one thing. Making the eventual explanation live up to years of speculation is another entirely.
That was one of the things we discussed with Graham, including why Hugh Howey’s answers in the original novels gave him confidence that the television adaptation could deliver a satisfying conclusion too.
“I love the mystery,” Graham tells us. “It’s a big mystery story, but I like Hugh’s answers. I felt that the way Hugh answered everything, it felt real, it felt settled, and it felt satisfying and it also felt relatively unpredictable.”
And there are still plenty more answers to come.
“There’s stuff you find out in the final episode that you don’t know now,” he teases. “And throughout Season 4, there’s, even in the first episode of Season 4, there is a huge reveal.”
We also get into the rather unusual challenges presented by adapting the second novel, which makes some major shifts away from the characters and setting audiences had spent so much time with. Unsurprisingly, having Rebecca Ferguson leading your television series means simply copying the structure of the book was never really going to be an option.
As Graham rather wonderfully points out when we cautiously mention that Juliette spends “a considerable amount of time” away from the action in the second novel: “The whole book, David. She appears in the last page.”
“I give Hugh grief about that all the time,” Graham jokes. “It’s like, you know why we did Season 3 the way we did Season 3? Because Juliette, we’ve got Rebecca Ferguson on the poster.”
That led the writers down some interesting roads in Season 3, particularly around one of the season’s major themes, and Graham explains how elements from Howey’s novels were reshaped to keep Juliette central to the television version of the story.
Memory became particularly important, drawing on ideas already present in Howey’s books and giving the writers a way to deal with what Juliette now knows.
“That became our primary thing story for it to be Juliette,” Graham explains. “Because that’s the only way they could control her. She knows too much. She can’t come back into the silo and say, ‘I know all of this stuff.’”
There is also the small matter of those two timelines.
Season 3 has expanded the world of ‘Silo’ considerably, jumping between life inside the silo and events from long before its inhabitants found themselves underground. Graham talks about how the writers worked out when to move between the two stories, the tricks they used to make those transitions feel natural, and why some of the decisions continued to change once episodes reached the edit.
“You’ll notice that we will often make a jump after the main title,” Graham says. “You get two fresh starts any episode, the opening and then after main titles. And then we felt that everything after that is just sort of a rhythm and also thematic.”
And then, of course, there is Season 4.
We already know the fourth season will bring ‘Silo’ to an end, but Graham reveals just how far ahead the creative team has actually been planning the conclusion. In fact, although Apple only publicly announced the two-season renewal later, Yost says the team themselves had confidence much earlier that they would be able to complete the story.
“We knew after Season 1 that we were gonna do all four seasons,” Graham reveals. “So we could plan out, when we were writing Season 2, we knew where we wanted that to end, where Season 3 would end, and what our goals were for four.”
That long-term planning even meant making adjustments to Season 3 while production was getting extremely close.
“There were things where, like, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta set that up in Season 3. We’ve gotta adjust that script now, even though we’re gonna start filming in a week. We have to make some changes so that we’re set up for Season 4.’”
With filming complete and the production now working through its visual effects, there is still a little way to go before we discover exactly how everything fits together. Graham tells us the final season is already finished shooting, adding: “A year from now, you’ll see. We’re all done. We’re just waiting, getting all the visual effects done.”
You can watch our full interview with Graham Yost below, as we discuss adapting Hugh Howey’s world, keeping Juliette at the heart of the series, juggling Season 3’s timelines, and preparing to bring one of Apple TV’s biggest sci-fi mysteries to its conclusion.
‘Silo’ Seasons 1 to 3 are available on Apple TV. Season 4 will be the final season, with Graham Yost indicating during our interview that it is expected to arrive in 2027.
If you want to keep track of this or any other shows, you can add them via our Never Miss system, and you’ll be notified when it gets a UK premiere date. Visit Never Miss.
Login to Geektown