Graham Yost Talks Silo Season Two

Hugh Howey’s self-published Wool book trilogy had a long, fraught journey to screen adaptation. First envisioned as a film back in 2012, the IP eventually made its way to AMC for development as a series in 2018 before finally landing at Apple TV+ with a series order in 2021. Under the helm of showrunner Graham Yost, Silo premiered to critical acclaim in May 2023, quickly landing a second season order.

The dystopian drama is set in an underground community of 10,000 people, cloistered inside because venturing outside of the silo will kill you. Or so they are told. Season one focused entirely on the community inside Silo 18, with a cast that included Rebecca Ferguson, Common and Tim Robbins. Ferguson’s character, Juliette Nichols, an engineer who has been appointed as the community’s sheriff, ends season one rebelling against the silo’s authoritarian leaders to venture outside. Season two, which drops on Apple TV+ this Friday, picks up shortly after the events of season one, following Nichols as she seeks shelter in another silo.

“We didn’t want to delay it,” Yost tells TV Drama. “When we were in the writers’ room, we said, Let’s not monkey around with making people think that maybe Juliette died—her face is on the poster. We came up with this prologue to disorient people but raise many questions, and [viewers] get a sense of time passing. It also establishes the back story of the silo she has to seek refuge in. Looking down, she sees all these bodies and an open door—so there is somewhere to go. But then she has to go through all these corpses. She ends up in a dead silo. And the first episode is her wondering if it is entirely dead. She hopes there’s someone else there. And then it’s clear that there isn’t. But then there is.”

Juliette’s relationship with that character, Solo, played by Steve Zahn, anchors much of her story arc this season, Yost explains. “He’s a pain in the ass because he hasn’t had any human contact in a long time. But he doesn’t want any human contact. He is a fascinating guy, but there’s something off with the story he tells about himself. Juliette picks up on that. But then she has other things she’s got to do, so she ignores it. By the end of the season, she has to solve the mystery of this guy to get what she wants, which is to get back to her silo. She also wants to save his life.”

There is much also happening back at Silo 18, Yost notes. “We’ve got all these people we’ve gotten to know over the first season, but now they’re in different relationships, and we get to explore that,” he says. “We see more of Robert Sims [played by Common] and his wife, [Camille, portrayed by Alexandria Riley]. Bernard [Holland, played by Robbins] has a relationship with Judge [Meadows, Tanya Moodie]. Knox and Shirley [Shane McRae and Remmie Milner] start out butting heads, and by the end—I’ll spoil it—they’re romantically involved. And then there’s Paul Billings [Chinaza Uche] and his wife [Caitlin Zoz]. All of those were interesting stories for us to play with. We go back and forth between the two silos throughout the season.”

The expansion of the storytelling universe required an expansion of the production set, too; season two was filmed across nine soundstages, with units in Hoddesdon Studios and OMA Studios and additional underwater photography at Pinewood Studios.

“We’ve got two amazing executive producers on the show, Joanna Thapa and Nina Jack, and they make the thing happen,” says Yost on the scale of the production. “They figure out the puzzle with their team. We do ten episodes in the season. Season two had three directors [Michael Dinner, Aric Avelino and Amber Templemore]. On any given week, they’re all filming all ten episodes. So, we’re doing a scene from this one, a scene from that one. What set is available? What can we rebuild? What do we put up? What actors are available? It’s an incredibly difficult scheduling nightmare. And then you have Silo 17, which has to look different, so we had to come up with a whole plan for that. That fell in the lap of Nicole Northridge, our production designer. We wanted it to feel like it’s just another silo, but it’s different. They’ve developed their own culture over time, and we wanted to get a taste of that.”

Season one of Silo is available now on Apple TV+, with season two premiering on Friday, November 15.