After a failed attempt at a Ridley Scott-produced film adaptation, Wool by Hugh Howey has finally made it to a screen, albeit, the one in your living room, courtesy of Apple TV+ (and AMC). Graham Yost is the showrunner, well known for the Timothy Olyphant vehicle, Justified, and for writing Speed. Yes, the pulpy action movie featuring Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, and a bus strapped with a bomb. But Yost is now an experienced showrunner and Howey feels hopeful that his story is in good hands.
Wool, or Silo (as the show is titled), is set in an underground silo, where a society is trapped for fear of an all-but-certain death if they leave their habitat. All they can see of the outside world is a screen showing a dreary landscape and the bodies of the fallen. But then the conspiracies begin.
Hugh Howey has been wanting to get the adaptation right for years now and is quite open about it over on his blog. While these days I can’t seem to get into reading fiction, Hugh’s writing really clicked with me at the time. It was approachable, not overly flowery but still delved deep into sci-fi concepts.
Howey’s publishing was notable too. While working at a bookstore in 2011, he initially released Wool as a short story. But as the demand for more grew, he kept on going. Before his paperbacks lined the walls of airport bookstores, Howey released Wool in five chunks, as self-published ebooks, finding the potential of serialisation on the Amazon Kindle. A few books later and he completed his “Silo Trilogy” with Shift and Dust.
On May 5, Apple dropped the first two episodes on its service, as is the new streaming way, to get you hooked before they drip feed you week by week. The pilot was an intriguing thriller that could almost stand alone, following the lives of Holston, the Sheriff (David Oyelowo), and his wife, Allison (Rashida Jones), as they are selected by the Silo’s lottery to have a pregnancy. Allison starts to go down the proverbial rabbit hole. The Silo’s history was supposedly erased in a rebellion 140 years ago, but then she meets someone who has found a hard drive with blueprints of the Silo, featuring a mysterious door. Not everything is adding up.
“If you boil the Pact down to one rule, it’s do not say you want to go outside or you will go outside.” - Holston
The second episode has us follow Juliette, played by Rebecca Fergusson. Juliette is an engineer working on the generators that power the Silo. We see Holston investigate a potential homicide of someone close to Juliette. Were they pushed over the railing? Juliette begins to go down a rabbit hole of her own.
But even this second episode doesn’t play straight with the narrative. While I do like being treated as an intelligent viewer, the way the episode switches between events before, during, and after the pilot episode, had me questioning what time period we were in (even as a book reader!). At one point Juliette’s seen telling her story to a friend of hers as if it’s the exposition device, but Juliette isn’t narrating the events, so it doesn’t really center anything and the flashbacks keep happening.
Seeing this story adapted in 2023 does take on some new meaning. We’ve been experiencing a pandemic, trapped in our homes. Post-apocalyptic fare is getting a little stale, though The Last of Us shows there’s still life in the genre. Not to mention, the conspiracy theorists creating misinformation and entrenching distrust in our experts and institutions. Silo is basically telling its characters to “do your own research” and that they might be right.
We get teased glimpses of Tim Robbins as Bernard, the head of IT, sporting white facial hair (we’ve come a long way since Shawshank), but he’s not really the focus of these opening episodes. All we know is he’s a bit of a grump. Common, the rapper, is another face teased, as the head of security. A lot of serious faces, but like the books, the show wants to tease out its mysteries.
It’s a little early to tell at this stage if the show will capture those same feelings when I first experienced the story and unraveled the mysteries of the Silo. But due to my love of the books I will be sticking with this one.