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In Apple TV’s Silo, Rebecca Ferguson stars as Juliette Nichols, an engineer who gets wrapped up in an investigation involving the local sheriff (David Oyelowo)—usual procedural stuff, except that the characters all inhabit a massive silo, 144-levels deep, protecting the remaining 10,000 humans from the allegedly poisoned world above. It’s an addictive show in spite of its smart, dystopian vibe and, it’s been renewed through a concluding fourth season, doing one better than the three-book Hugh Howey novel series on which it’s based.
Season three is expected sometime in 2026. In the meantime, you can catch these other shows that blend dystopian settings with existential mysteries. Stream Silo on Apple TV
Snowpiercer (2020 – 2024)
Though initially feeling like an unnecessary extension of Bong Joon Ho’s allegorical post-apocalyptic film, Snowpiercer the show ultimately takes on a life of its own as a clever sci-fi melodrama, smartly recognizing that there are no heroes and few true villains at the end of the world—it’s mostly just people doing whatever they can to survive. In a frozen future (2026, to be precise), humanity survives on an extremely long train that circumnavigates the globe. If it stops, the power will go out and everyone (literally everyone) will die. Those who came aboard with wealth live near the front in relative luxury, while the poor live on scraps (or worse) in the tail. Daveed Diggs stars as former detective Andre Layton, a “Tailie” deputized by Jennifer Connelly’s Melanie Cavill, engineer and the train’s head of hospitality, to solve a series of murders. The inevitable uprising that follows sets the two of them on different sides of a violent conflict, as each comes to realize they’re just pawns of elites—same as it ever was. Stream Snowpiercer on AMC+ or buy episodes from Prime Video.
Station Eleven (2021 – 2022)
The miniseries, based on the Emily St. John Mandel bestseller, was released at either the best time or the worst possible time: The story of the world 20 years after a devastating flu pandemic hit HBO square in the middle of COVID—and don’t all of our current apocalypse dramas owe just a bit to that waking nightmare? The adaptation follows two tracks. In the past, Kirsten Raymonde is a young stage actor whose performance in a production of King Lear is cut short by the onset of a virus with a 99% fatality rate. We also visit Kirsten 20 years on, still an actor, but in a world very much changed. This one is a slow-burn, picking up steam only after a couple of episodes, but ultimately, it makes a moving case for the power of art, even (or especially) in moments when survival is on the line. Stream Station Eleven on HBO Max.
Pluribus (2025 – )
The tones here aren’t a match, with Pluribus leaning toward very dark comedy, but, as far as post-apocalyptic mysteries go, you could do a lot worse than this sci-fi dystopia from Breaking Bad‘s Vince Gilligan. Well, I say dystopia, but the world of Pluribus is about as good as it gets for just about everyone but our main character. Rhea Seehorn plays Carol Sturka, a fantasy romance author and general grouch who becomes one of only 13 people on the planet immune to the “Joining”—the result of an alien virus that transforms the rest of humanity into a peaceful, perky, and perpetually content hive mind. Carol refuses to surrender her miserableness in the face of a loss of identity, fighting instead to restore humanity to its admittedly cruddy ways. Thrilling, heartbreaking, and oddly funny, the show manages to address some big questions about what it means to be human, and what we’d be willing to give up to change. Stream Pluribus on Apple TV+.
Black Knight (2023)
Decades after a comet impact killed most of the Earth’s population and left a barely breathable atmosphere, survivors in Seoul live in wildly segregated conditions: QR codes tattooed on hands determine your level of access to resources including air: supplemental oxygen is a necessity for survival, to the point that cutting off the hand of someone with a better code than yours is seen as a viable means of moving up. It’s all controlled by the mega-corporation that’s building an underground refuge for survivors of its choosing, and that doles out oxygen via couriers who’ve taken on legendary status. One such deliveryman, known only as 5-8 (Kim Woo-bin), is also running an underground operation to help out the neediest of Seoul’s population—which soon puts him at odds with the powers that be. The sepia-toned dystopia of Black Knight is absolutely stunning. Stream Black Knight on Netflix.
Wayward Pines (2015 – 2016)
While we’re talking high-concept sci-fi, let’s head off to Wayward Pines: from which you will never leave. Based on a trilogy of Blake Crouch novels, this one stars, initially, Matt Dillon as a Secret Service agent investigating the disappearances of two fellow agents in the Idaho town of Wayward Pines. Things go awry pretty much immediately, and he wakes up from a car accident to find one of the agents (Carla Gugino), who’s also his ex, having settled down in the seemingly idyllic community—and she’s 12 years older than when he last saw her a few weeks ago. Even more dramatically, the local sheriff (Terrence Howard) enforces a strict “no one ever leaves” policy, on pain of having one’s neck slit. As in Silo, the mysteries pile up from there. Stream Wayward Pines on Hulu.
Paradise (2025 – )
Paradise reunites This is Us creator Dan Fogelman with one of that ensemble’s stars, Sterling K. Brown, for something quite different. The series looks more like a political thriller at the outset: We’re in, apparently, an affluent suburban town in which everything looks fairly tidy—it’s the home of Brown’s Xavier Collins, a widower and Secret Service agent, which would be more impressive if the President he’d been serving (James Marsden) hadn’t been murdered (much of the narrative here is revealed in flashbacks). Oh, and that cute little town? Turns out that it’s an underground bunker, albeit a fancier one than in Silo…but just as ominously mysterious. Stream Paradise on Hulu.
The Rain (2018 – 2020)
Leave it to those melancholy Danes to center an apocalypse around precipitation. In this three-season import, a virus spread by rainfall that wipes out most of the population of Scandinavia. Siblings Simone and Rasmus emerge from their bunker six years later, setting off across the countryside with the hope of finding a safe haven, and maybe track down their father. It turns out that one of them holds the key to wiping out the virus and saving the world. It’s not the most original premise (The Last of Us game came out five years earlier), but the setting gives it a unique feel, and the series comes to a decisive ending. Stream The Rain on Netflix.
War of the Worlds (2019 – 2022)
The War of the Worlds industrial complex is never far from churning out new adaptations, this being one of two competing series that started just in 2019. There was a period-faithful BBC miniseries, and then this French co-production serving as a much looser, modern-set adaptation. Gabriel Byrne and Elizabeth McGovern lead the cast as estranged couple Bill and Helen, among the few survivors of an alien pulse that leaves the world sparsely populated, humans under constant threat from the mysterious invaders who aren’t done with us yet. It’s as dark as they come, which feels appropriate, with traumatized individuals nursing secrets and making calculations as to whom they might be willing to sacrifice in order to survive our new overlords. Stream War of the Worlds on MGM+ or buy it from Prime Video.
Battlestar Galactica (2003 – 2009)
Going from an underground dystopia to an outer-space dystopia only to find that things aren’t all that different: unless we’re concerned that the giant hunk of metal that contains the bulk of surviving humanity is horizontal in space rather than vertical and underground. Humans will figure out how to take our problems with us anywhere, being the point. Here, the trigger is the monotheistic Cylons, an artificial intelligence once relegated to serve as a labor force and who evolve, rebel, and have a plan involving wiping out their former masters in twelve colony worlds. The relatively few survivors, all that remains of humanity, escape on the title ship accompanied by a handful of others. Politics follow them, with military commander Adama (Edward James Olmos) frequently at odds with Mary McDonnell’s Laura Roslin, the Education Secretary promoted to President when the entire political structure was wiped out. One of the smartest shows of the aughts, in spite of the silly name. Buy Battlestar Galactica from Prime Video.
Severance (2022 – )
Another prestigious, high-concept sci-fi series, Severance makes tremendous use of its primary setting: one maze-like floor of what looks like, at first blush, a typical office workspace. Talk about your dystopias: I think I’d rather live in the silo, tbh. Late-stage capitalism encourages “work-life balance” while simultaneously making it impossible, and then makes us feel guilty about it. In Severance, biotechnology giant Lumon Industries has a solution: They split your consciousness between your life at work and your life outside of it. For our lead characters (played by Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, Britt Lower, and more) the work- and home-based consciousnesses grow apart to the point that they become entirely different people. The show blends the conventions of office-based dark comedies with movies like Brazil and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and dives into the dangers of modern American-style totalitarian capitalism while providing a reminder that technology often promises to improve our lives while only making them worse. Stream Severance on Apple TV+.
Fallout (2024 – )
Like Silo, we’re stuck with a large chunk of humanity being forced to live underground for reasons that aren’t entirely legit. In the world of Fallout, adapted from the video games, the aesthetic of the 1950s hung on for a lot longer than it did in our own, so plot similarities give way, in part, to Fallout’s very unique sense of style. The background is a little complicated, but not belabored in the show itself: It’s 2296, on an Earth devastated two centuries earlier by a nuclear war between the United States and China. Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) emerges from the underground fallout shelter where she’s lived her entire life in order to find her father, kidnapped by raiders. The aboveground wasteland is dominated by warring factions, each of which considers the others cults and believes that they alone know the correct way forward for mankind. Amid this conflict, the landscape is also overrun by Ghouls, Gulpers, and other wild radiation monsters, with Lucy just about the only human with any lingering belief in humanity. Stream Fallout on Prime Video.
Under the Dome (2013 – 2015)
Not to be confused with The Simpsons Movie, this is the other one about an entire town trapped under a giant dome. Adapted, rather loosely, from the Stephen King novel, the show finds an entire community cut off from the rest of the world—their own personal apocalypse. As resources begin to dwindle, social structures begin to collapse, and the squabbling residents need to figure out how to survive and, if they’re ever to escape, to figure out why they’ve been trapped under this dome to begin with. Stream Under the Dome on Paramount+.
