Silo Review

The silo is the best character in the show. Graham Yost's adaptation of Hugh Howey's novels builds its 144 levels as a working machine of bolted steel, work lights and one spiral staircase that turns every journey into a climb, and the production design does exposition the scripts never have to: you can read the place's class system from how far down a character lives.

Rebecca Ferguson carries the rest. As Juliette Nichols, an engineer from the generator rooms at the bottom who is pushed into the sheriff's job, she plays competence as a kind of grief, and the show is at its best when it simply follows her fixing something. Tim Robbins makes Bernard Holland, the head of IT, a bureaucrat whose reasonableness is the most frightening thing in the silo, and Common's Robert Sims gives its security a face.

Its one weakness is the pace of the mystery. The first season spends episodes restating what the pilot already made plain, and the second parts Juliette from the rest of the cast for long stretches. It matters less than it should: the world is built so completely, and Ferguson is so good, that the slow reveals read as confidence rather than stalling, and the answers, when they come, repay the wait.