Apple TV+ is the HBO of Sci-Fi
With Silo and Severance, Apple TV+ has cemented itself as the new home of human-centric science fiction television.
Apple recently announced that the science fiction series Silo would be renewed for a third and final season on Apple TV+. Silo is not only one of the best series available on Apple TV+, I’d argue it has become one of the best science fiction television series in years precisely because it focuses so tightly on character—and this human-centric approach to sci-fi has fast become Apple TV+’s signature.
At its heart, Silo is a story about humans being forced to contend with each other in a restrictive, unnatural, and potentially lethal environment, one devoid of any contact with the natural world.
Starring Rebecca Ferguson and based upon the best-selling novels Wool, Shift, and Dust by Hugh Howey, Silo follows 10,000+ humans crammed into a massive underground silo hundreds of stories deep, locked away from the poisonous atmosphere of the surface. No one knows who built the silo or when, and anyone who dissents or questions the authority of the silo’s leadership is sent outside “to clean”—they’re given a small cloth to wipe the lens of a camera that gives the occupants of the silo their only limited view of the outside world. Being sent outside is a death sentence… or is it? This is as far as I am willing to go without risking spoilers; you’ll just have to watch the series for yourself to learn more.
What’s also remarkable about Silo is not just the script, the stellar cast, the incredibly detailed worldbuilding (over 70 sets were constructed for the series), or the superb cinematography. Silo is only one of many great science fiction series currently available on Apple TV+. Though the streamer is best known for high-profile series like Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, and The Morning Show (I’m also a huge fan of Drops of God and Bad Sisters), over the past five years, Apple TV+ has slowly morphed into becoming the home of some of the very best sci-fi series available anywhere. And I am not the only person to have noticed this.
Apple TV+’s sci-fi collection is genuinely impressive: For All Mankind, one of the streamer’s first-ever shows and an incredible what-if from the creator of the seminal Battlestar Galactica reboot (I still don’t think I’ve recovered from the harrowing, emotional finale of For All Mankind’s second season); See, a woefully underappreciated and genuinely unique series, possibly inspired by H.G. Wells' 1904 short story “The Country of the Blind”; Invasion, perhaps a little cerebral at times but I loved the interweaving international storylines and the goopy, pointy, stabby aliens; Sunny, a quirky, beautifully designed show that is both funny and poignant starring the excellent Rashida Jones (who is also in the first season of Silo); Hello Tomorrow, a Death of a Salesman-like tale set in a stylized 1950s retro-futuristic suburban America; and of course, the epically epic Foundation (more on this series later).
And these are just the shows I have seen. To my eternal shame, I have yet to watch Ben Stiller’s surreal office drama Severance, widely regarded as having a complete banger of a first season (winning two Emmys and a Peabody Award to prove it). Expectations are understandably high for season 2, which premiers in January 2025.
There were few clues that Apple TV+ would grow into the sci-fi powerhouse it’s become, especially as Amazon Prime seemed more likely to claim that title at the time. Amazon’s Prime Video, much to the appreciation of the show's passionate fanbase, “saved” The Expanse after Syfy decided not to renew the show for a fourth season. The "Screaming Warhawks" were delighted. Yet Amazon’s passion for sci-fi was relatively short-lived, or rather perhaps more interested in the “book adaptation” part of The Expanse, which is based on James S. A. Corey’s long-running series of the same name. In the subsequent years, the streamer has thrown money like a drunken sailor at The Rings of Power—a wildly ambitious adaptation of Tolkien's The Silmarillion, which, like the book, was so glacially slow that no amount of exquisite production design could, in my opinion, make it worth watching.
As Amazon moved more towards fantasy, Apple signaled just how seriously it was taking sci-fi when, in June 2021, it released the trailer for Foundation, based upon Isaac Asimov’s revered, Nebula-award-winning trilogy of books, first published in 1951. Foundation was astonishing in terms of the show's big-budget production values, lavish sets and styling, and impressive special effects. Yet, to my mind, despite how beautiful the show looked, the main characters seemed a little crushed by the weightiness of the series' ambition and had little space to breathe. That didn’t stop Foundation from being renewed for another two seasons: Season two premiered in July 2023, and the third season will arrive sometime in 2025.
Foundation set an incredibly high bar for the sci-fi shows that followed and arguably defined the visual creative style for an AppleTV+ series—or, at least for an AppleTV+ science fiction series: Dark, moody lighting (some might say, too dark), lots of cool technology and special effects, and an absurdly high production budget. It seemed to many that Apple was making a play to become the new HBO, which, in 2023, was inexplicably renamed Max in one of the worst acts of brand vandalism in recent memory.
Unlike Netflix's endless stream of content, HBO's programming has historically felt curated.
I think it’s safe to say you "know" an HBO series when you see it. HBO shows historically have the quality, writing, ambitious plotlines, sophisticated storytelling, and character development that always seem to tap into the zeitgeist of the moment. HBO became widely regarded as the home of some of the best television shows ever made: Sopranos, Game of Thrones, The Wire, Sex and the City, True Detective, and more recently, Euphoria, The White Lotus, and Succession.
Unlike a behemoth like Netflix, a network that doesn't need a singularly definitive "brand" of show because it's making a quantity play to reach the broadest global audience possible (which is not to say that many shows on Netflix aren't good, they absolutely are), HBO's programming has historically felt curated—original programming that's been given time and often multiple seasons to develop and grow. Netflix, on the other hand, is renowned for canceling popular shows after a single season.
Apple has canceled shows, too. But to date, only one, Constellation was science fiction (you could argue that Time Bandits was also sci-fi, but I classify it more as fantasy), and sci-fi still consistently ranks highly in terms of the most popular AppleTV+ shows.
All of this is to say, even though Apple has been trying a few different things this year—making a massive play for live sports audiences with Friday Night Baseball and Major League Soccer, and continues to invest in movies like the recent Wolfs, Blitz and Fly Me to the Moon—I think it’s hard not to agree that the one consistent bright spots, both in terms of critical acclaim and viewership figures is science fiction.
This makes perfect sense if you think about it: Apple’s product ethos centers around beautifully designed, bold, brave, innovative, minimalistic products with emotional connection and user-focused utility, all of which are very science fiction-y attributes. And, of course, I’d argue if you wanted to create content that looks exceptionally good on a 6.9-inch Super Retina XDR OLED display with ProMotion (120Hz adaptive refresh rate) and a pixel density exceeding 450 PPI, what better genre than gorgeous, rich visual science fiction series full of futuristic tech, staggering sets and alien worlds or even the retro-tech gritty realism of wholly unique show like Silo?
It certainly appears that Apple sees sci-fi as the best genre with which to build Apple TV+ as a Criterion-like destination. In February, the company announced that a new drama was in the works based upon one of the most important works of science fiction to explore the intersection of humanity and technology within a future world dominated by AI: William Gibson’s 1984 debut novel, Neuromancer.
The new Neuromancer series will debut on Apple TV+ sometime in 2025 or 2026. Meanwhile, the finale of Silo season two will air on January 17, 2025. I can’t wait for both.