[This story contains spoilers from the Silo season two premiere.]
Graham Yost doesn’t want you to read the Silo book series — not yet, at least.
“I usually try and say [that] sitting right next to [author] Hugh Howey,” the Silo showrunner jokes from his office in Carmel, California. “Buy copies of the book, but don’t read them yet.”
Season two of Apple TV‘s Silo premiered on Friday, with episodes rolling out weekly until the Jan. 17, 2025 finale. Yost has made no secret of his departure from the source material, pulling whole episodes out of single sentences in Wool, Howey’s first of three books in the Silo series. Howey is an executive producer on the show, and by all accounts, is thoroughly pleased with Yost’s work.
Season one covered the first half of Wool; season two will finish it. The remaining two books are Shift and Dust. “We thought of different structures for season two,” Yost says, entertaining longer and shorter versions of the first book’s story, only settling on the syncing of text and screen when it was clearly the best way to finish. “It’s really looking for the big emotional hook,” Yost says. “And just, frankly, the fun. What’s the most fun way to end?”
In season one, Rebecca Ferguson played Juliette Nichols, a mechanic-turned-sheriff living in an underground silo that protects 10,000 people from a toxic world above them. Things went awry when she began investigating the murder of her boyfriend, George (Ferdinand Kingsley), ultimately finishing the season by journeying beyond the silo’s airlocked door and, unlike all who had tried before her, lived to tell the tale (and star in season two).
The season two premiere picks up where season one left off, with Juliette now fending for survival in the neighboring and mostly abandoned Silo 17, while both her friends and enemies search for answers back home.
“There was a tagline when one of the books came out,” Yost says: “If the lies don’t kill you, the truth will.” Apple TV now uses the phrase on their own marketing, too. “It’s like, there you go. That’s the kind of show I want to work on,” he says.
He describes the books as a” big box of a story” to pull ideas from, a non-chronological idea binder. “It’s fun just to work in that world,” he says.
Yost is no stranger to adapted screenplays — he wrote the 2010 FX series Justified, based on the stories of Elmore Leonard, which ran for six seasons, garnered eight Emmy nominations and won a Peabody. So, I ask him: If accuracy is not the answer, then what is?
“You have to love the underlying material,” Yost says. He points to perhaps the most famous adaptation of all time: “New Line took such a huge risk saying yes to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings,” he says, “but I think it was clear from the first meeting that he loved the books, and it was clear to the fans that he loved the books.”
Yost felt the same way about Justified, and now Silo. “It would be pointless to do it if you don’t [love it].”
Good books will always be rich with potential, he adds. “In the book, George, Juliette’s boyfriend, is barely mentioned. It’s just one line. It was like, ‘Let’s use that as the engine for the season.’ What happened to George?”
He rattles off more examples of changes — the rebellion backstory and Juliette’s relationship with Solo, an endearing but fickle survivor of Silo 17 played by Steve Zahn. “There was stuff [Howey] did in a later section of the second book that we went, ‘Let’s use that here,'” he adds. “But it still ends up in sort of the same place, and has the same basic moves.”
Yost is also the writer behind action thrillers Speed, Broken Arrow and Hard Rain. “We just spend our whole days problem solving,” he says of his job, quoting Mission: Impossible writer James Long.
“What’s the problem? What’s the first attempt? What happens if that doesn’t work? What’s the final salute? What’s the resolve of it? That’s something that I love doing,” he says. “I love thinking of that and and thinking, ‘Is there a way to do it that maybe the audience hasn’t seen it so much?'”
For all the show’s action — and season two will bring plenty — Yost is clear: Silo is a mystery show. “What happened? Why are people living underground? And then, ‘Oh, my God, there are more silos.’ You get some answers, and then there are many more questions,” he says.
But not all questions are created equal. “The good questions are when you’re leaning forward, literally, when you find yourself looking, going, ‘What? Wait!'” he says. “The bad ones are, What’s going on? I’m not clear what’s going on.”
Yost avoids the latter by centering the show’s mystery in the eyes of Juliette. “She is the anchor to that,” he says. “We’re OK not knowing much beyond [her] — we’re always trying to just stay with Juliette.”
Unlike season one, Yost’s new installment of episodes occur via simultaneous storylines, one focused on Juliette’s new journey, in Silo 17 with Solo, and another on the unrest back home, where Shirley (Remmie Milner), Knox (Shane McRae), Walker (Harriet Walter) and Carla (Clare Perkins) lead a movement for revolution.
“It was a different job to have the two stories going,” Yost says of season two. “We didn’t want to have the stories playing off each other too much, but we wanted it to sort of rhyme in a certain way. What Juliette is going through is, if not echoed in the Silo 18 story, it leads to… there is some kind of reflection to make sure that Juliette was always on the minds of the people in her home silo.”
The pacing is similar to that of a flashback, which Yost used frequently in season one and with which he opens season two. In the beginning moments of the premiere — written by Yost — the audience learns about the uprising that killed Silo 17 around three decades ago, and then sees a 13-year-old Juliette (Amelie Child-Villiers) begin her work in Silo 18’s mechanical, where she slowly earned the friendship of a young Shirley (Ida Brooke).
“Juliette isn’t consciously thinking about her experiences as a young girl in mechanical [when she finds Silo 17],” Yost says. “But we realize, Oh, she has been alone before.” Then, with the addition of Shirley, another lesson: “Oh, she doesn’t want to be alone,” Yost says. “We’re all looking for human companionship. Tom Hanks had a volleyball in Castaway and Juliet’s looking for something. And so that pulls her forward to find out what that little ticking sound is.”
Thus, as the show grows, so do the number of (good) questions. But Yost says not to fear. “It’s not open-ended,” he says of his team’s plans. “Hugh wrote a trilogy. [We have] a great group of writers who are really paying attention to things.”
He won’t say what exactly the plans are, but he’s clearheaded with vision. “There’s a lot of calculation that goes into it,” he says. “My promise to the audience is, if we get to do the run of the series, we will answer to the best of our ability all the questions. That doesn’t mean we’re going to be perfect in it. That doesn’t mean we won’t drop a ball and go, ‘Oh shit. We never explained that.’ But that’s our goal.”
And to fans who miss those early season one episodes with Rashida Jones and David Oyelowo, he adds: “We are people on this show who like to bring people back. That doesn’t mean that we get to bring them all back in season two. Hopefully we get to do the other seasons, because there are other people we’d want to see again.”
He adds, “The reason I say not to read the books yet is because [Howey] answers the question. If we get to do the whole series, we will answer the question, and I like the way he did it.”
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The first episode of Silo is now streaming on Apple TV+, with new episodes releasing every Friday.
English (US) ·