Showrunner Graham Yost on Unraveling the Many Mysteries of ‘Silo’

Graham Yost jokes that it’s his job to ruin our lives by making us stay up late and binge-watch his shows. Well, if the ferocity with which I tore through Silo’s ten episodes is any indication, Mr. Yost has more than accomplished his goal.

Yost is the creator and showrunner of Silo, where he also serves as a writer and executive producer for the Apple TV+ dystopian series. Based on Hugh Howey’s post-apocalyptic novella, “Wool;” Silo stars a pitch perfect Rebecca Ferguson as engineer Juliette Nichols, who becomes embroiled in the mysteries of the Silo. Why was the Silo built? Why are the residents prohibited from going outside? Why are they segregated by class and forbidden to access information about the past?

Silo is mysterious and atmospheric, unraveling new twists with each episode—a true underrated gem of the 2023 TV season.

Yost is a capable and passionate steward, bringing to the screen a fully-realized new world of multidimensional characters and political intrigue. Here in an interview with Awards Daily, Yost details how his team mapped out the twisty first season and dives into the very impressive world-building.

***This interview contains major spoilers, proceed with caution***

Awards Daily: So, the first thing that blew my mind was the fact that the Silo series is nine books, and in season one, the show only covers the first half of the first book.

Graham Yost: Is it nine books now? For us, we’ve really just got the trilogy— “Wool,” “Shift,” and “Dust.” The series is planned on those three books. But yes, season one is just the first half of “Wool.” 

AD: I think the most impressive thing about Silo is the world building, it’s so expansive. How did you all make those decisions?

GY: A lot of it is having a room full of really smart, fun writers. 

We knew that we didn’t want to have too much of a big data dump at the top. We wanted to let information roll out as characters went through it, and we could just pick it up on the fly. 

That said, we’ve got the opening narration. We don’t know when the Silo was built or why; all of that stuff sets up the basic premise of the show in the first 30 seconds. But in terms of that world-building, so much of it is just visual; you see people living in the world and let the details emerge.

Big picture, we’re in the first half of the first book.

We knew a great place to end the season would be Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) going out to clean, walking over the hill, and disappearing. That’s the first time that’s ever happened. And we see that the world is destroyed. It really is a wasteland. And then we see that there is a hell of a lot more going on out there. There are many more Silos, and we felt that was a good place to end the season. 

I knew I wanted to start the series with the Holston (David Oyelowo) and Allison (Rashida Jones) story because that’s how Hugh [Howey} started his whole writing adventure. It also was a great way to build the world in that first episode.

The question became, what would be the rest of the story for the first season? That was our big challenge.

AD: I love that the first episode is a little bit of a misdirect because we think we’re following this couple…

 GY: And then they’re dead.

AD: Right! Silo feels very episodic; the story unfolds like the chapters of a book. How did you decide on that structure?

GY: Well, it’s part of the streaming world. You want to have a cliffhanger; you want to have something that will let people have that clock roll out at the end of the episode and just go into the next. It’s our job to ruin people’s lives by making them stay up and binge. That’s one of the metrics now—do people roll into the next episode? 

Part of the planning right from the beginning is, ‘Okay, how does this episode end? What are we trying to build to?’ We knew that episode one would end with Alison going out, then Holston meeting Juliette, and then Holston going out, and we’re done. What’s going to happen next episode two? Now we’ve met Juliette. She’s in peril. Okay. In episode three, you’ve solved one problem; now the mayor’s dead. In Episode four, Juliette’s going to get some key information, and Marnes (Will Patton) is dead. In episode five, Juliette sets something up to pursue what she wants: to find out what happened to George (Ferdinand Kingsley).

A big question was, when do we reveal that there are cameras? How long can we have Juliette not know that? And we figured anything more than one episode, the audience is going to get tired of it. So, she’s got to figure out the cameras by the end of episode seven. That became a marker for us. We built the season by first creating the markers on our board. Where are we trying to get to with each episode? Then things change, you try it one way, and it’s like, ‘No, we got to flip that, and then you try it another way.’ That’s just the job.

We’re in the middle of filming season 2, and we had to do the same thing with that.

AD: Let’s skip ahead. What can you tell me about season two?

GY: I know absolutely nothing. I won’t tell you a thing except that there is one.

AD: [Laughs]. Fair enough.

GY: I mean, what can I tell you? Well, I tell everyone, ‘buy the books but don’t read them until the series is over so that we get to be the ones who tell the story and reveal the answers to the mystery. 

AD: Oh, that’s interesting. I’ll take you up on that.

I have to ask you about Rebecca Ferguson. I think she’s such a big part of why Silo works because we’re so invested in her and her performance, which adds so much to the naturalistic feel of the show. Rebecca hits every beat so perfectly. How did you get her to sign on?

GY: It’s becoming one of the stories of the show, which is that [director and co-executive producer] Morten Tyldum and I got on a Zoom with her. I’ve been a huge fan, and I’m not using that in the Hollywood sense. I have been a huge fan since I saw her in her first Mission Impossible movie, where my response when I was halfway through the film was, ‘Where the hell did she come from?’ Because I’d never seen her before. And the answer was Sweden. That’s why I hadn’t seen her. She had done The White Queen, but I’d never watched that show. Thank goodness that the casting people on Mission had seen that, found her, and brought her in—she clicked, and away she went.

 I knew that she was charismatic, athletic, and a great actor. I mean, she just pulls you in. And then you find out she is just a just a joy to work with. I don’t know. She’s got that thing. She’s got that thing that pulls you in. You want to be her. You want to spend time with her.

AD: So, let me ask you, what is it about Silo to you that pulls you in?

GY: When I read the books, as I’ve now advised you not to do until the series is over because, hopefully, the series will do the same thing for you as the books did for me— I wanted to find out what was going on. I wanted to find out why they couldn’t go outside. I wanted to find out what happened. You start finding the rules of the Silo. Well, why is that? Why are there no elevators? There are so many interesting questions and mysteries.

And when you find that these characters are also asking these questions, it’s fun to go with them as they start to figure things out. That’s what hooked me right from the beginning—it’s a big mystery story, but it’s a different kind of mystery. It’s not a whodunit. Although, in the long run, that’s not entirely wrong; that will be part of the bigger story, but it is a mystery story.

Mike White said in an interview after The White Lotus was such a hit that if his previous show, Enlightened, said, ‘Well, I should have had a dead body turn up in that one, then that show would still be on.’ A mystery is a really great thing to hang a show on.

AD: What has been the most rewarding element of bringing to life this thing that you’re such a fan of and seeing it out into the world? The response to Silo, by the way, has been amazing.

GY: We pinch ourselves. Because when you’re deep inside it and working on it, you’re writing it 8,000 miles away from where it’s being filmed, the logistics, and going back and forth and all this stuff. When it all comes together, and then people enjoy it, it’s incredibly gratifying. We’re all just thrilled that it became part of any conversation. We send each other emails where it’s entered some part of the zeitgeist, and you see it popping up in a cartoon panel or whatever. It gives us a real jolt.

Building this show was a lot of fun, but it was very difficult, and many decisions had to be made. We would second-guess each other down the line. I’m talking about the writing, the production design, and how it will be built—It’s solving problems daily. And when you do that with a great group of people who are really good at their jobs and have fun with it, then it’s not that bad. It can be exhausting, but it’s a good job. 

The one surprising thing was also the thing that we were terrified of. We did the mini writer’s room just as COVID entered the news out of China in January 2020. We did the big writer’s room that summer, where we were all locked away in our own little Silos. The fear was, would people want to watch a show about people who can’t leave a place and go outside? The gratifying thing is, yes, they are willing, and not only willing, but enjoy watching that story. And I don’t think it’s because it’s inside. I think it’s because of the production design, the directing, and the cast, and I’ll take part of the credit with all the other writers. We’re proud of the job we did in terms of bringing a story to life from the page.

AD: I love the structure of the show. You have something like episode three, which feels like an action thriller. Some of Silo’s mysteries are revealed fairly quickly, while George and Juliette’s relationship history is given to us in pieces. How do you all find the right balance in the writer’s room?

GY: So much of it is, for lack of a better term, intuitive. The great thing about writing for television, in this streaming world, and a show like this, is that we have to block-shoot the whole thing. For season 2, for example, there would be weeks where we’d have all three of our directors working on all episodes of the season; there’ll be a little bit from 10, a little bit from three, a little bit from five because those were the sets that were available. Then we have to go to other sets, swap out the ones we just left, and turn them into something else. So, you have to write all the scripts in advance. We finished writing the season well in advance so that we could plan the whole thing. Well, when you do that, you can look at the whole season and say, ‘Oh, we need to bring this in; we need to move this beat up. We need to slide this beat down. We need more between these two characters. Hey, wait a second, I’ve got an idea for a three-beat story for these characters.’ That comes out in the writer’s room. And that can also come when you’re talking to the directors, when you’re talking to the actors, ‘Oh yeah, we haven’t shot that scene for episode three yet, let’s add a beat where we find out this, or that sets this up for later.’

 So, looking at a whole season at once because you’ve got all the scripts in is a benefit because you can figure out how to tell the whole story.

AD: I love that. It’s like a puzzle within your show that’s also a puzzle.

 GY: It’s always, it’s always a puzzle, yeah. 

AD: Graham, other than telling people that they have to watch Silo, it’s so good. Is there anything else you’d like to mention?

GY: it would be the cast. And it’s not just that Rebecca is a hoot and really great at her job, but we’ve got Tim Robbins. We’ve got Avi Nash, and we’ve got Shane McRae and Chinaza Uche. Harriet Walter and Common, and I’m forgetting people, right?

They’ve all enjoyed working on the project. They’ve all gotten into the Silo story, and they’re all invested in being a part of this. That’s incredibly rewarding. 

Silo is streaming now on Apple TV+.